


Werewolves of Cardiff

by cosmogyrals



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-07
Updated: 2014-01-17
Packaged: 2018-01-03 21:32:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1073286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyrals/pseuds/cosmogyrals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Owen's spent years hiding a secret from the rest of the team, but when Tosh is in danger, Jack forces him to save her the only way he can. Tosh has to come to grips with the changes in her life, while Owen deals with the realisation that she might mean more to him than he's entirely comfortable with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Owen found himself roused from sleep by the insistent buzzing of his mobile. He'd put the phone on silent, but it had nearly vibrated off his bedside table from all the calls he'd missed. He grabbed it and answered without looking at the screen; there was only one person who was likely to keep calling him the day after a full moon. "It's my day off, Jack."

"I don't care. Get down to the Hub now. And I mean now, not once you've showered and had breakfast." Jack's words were terse, his voice edged with anger, and Owen knew there was no arguing with him. Besides, Jack hadn't tried to call him in on a full moon since the first day he'd missed, so it had to be drastic.

"I'll be there in ten minutes," he promised, and he hung up the phone. Though Owen wouldn't have ordinarily dreamt of turning up at work unshowered and unshaven, he really didn't want to risk invoking Jack's wrath, not when it was clearly something of such importance.

He didn't even stop to put his contacts in; he just threw on a shirt and jeans (because despite the urgency involved, he doubted Jack wanted him to show up starkers) and headed for his car. In fact, he made it to the Hub in five minutes. As he came in the door, he tossed Ianto the keys to his car so he could move it to proper parking. Ianto didn't even offer him a sarcastic comment, which meant that the situation must have truly been grave.

"Down here, Owen," Jack called out from the autopsy bay. Owen trotted down the stairs obediently (like a dog, he thought bitterly), and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the reason why he'd been called in: Tosh was prone on the table, the only signs of life on the displays of the monitors that surrounded her. It felt like a punch straight to the gut, seeing her lifeless like that.

"What the fuck, Jack?" he hissed through clenched teeth. He was only frozen for a moment before he moved into action, glancing from one screen to another as he bent over her body. He couldn't help but think of Katie, dead on the operating table. Tosh wasn't dead yet, but her vital signs weren't good – the problem was, Tosh didn't have any visible injuries. There was no reason why she should have been crashing like this.

"I don't know. Some artefact she was examining – I didn't even see what happened, but she just collapsed. She hasn't been conscious since then. Nothing showed up on the monitors, no strange fluctuations of energy or anything like that. We'd already scanned it for any recognisable toxic materials. It should've been safe, Owen." His jaw was clenched tight, his arms folded over his chest as he watched Owen. 

"Should've been, yeah, but obviously it wasn't." Owen grabbed a needle and wrapped an elastic band around Tosh's arm, prodding at her elbow till he found a place to draw blood. "How long's she been like this?"

"An hour or so. I tried everything I could think of before I called you, Owen, but her vitals have been falling the whole time."

"Shit." Owen wasn't sure he even had time to run blood tests if it had only been an hour since she'd collapsed. This was advanced; he suspected her organs would start failing in another ten minutes, at this rate. "So you called me in just to watch her die?" Because that was the crux of the matter: there wasn't anything he could do for her. Whatever it was that was killing Toshiko, he didn't have time to figure out what it was and try to find a solution. 

"You know there's another option." Jack fixed him with a steely glare, pinning Owen in place. He squirmed and reached up to scratch at the back of his neck, looking down at the floor.

"I can't, Jack," he muttered finally. Oh, he knew what Jack was asking him to do – the problem was that Jack didn't fully understand it himself.

"I'm not giving you a choice in the matter, Owen."

"What about Tosh?" Owen retorted sharply, looking up at Jack again. "Shouldn't she get a choice?" Changing someone without their permission was, as a rule, frowned upon in werewolf society. While Owen wasn't bound by all the traditions a pack would have upheld, the thought of violating someone without their permission, essentially stripping them of their humanity, filled him with revulsion. It was precisely what had happened to him, and that made the thought of doing it to Tosh even more abhorrent.

"She'd want to live." Jack pulled his pistol from its holster, aiming it at Owen. The click echoed through the autopsy bay as he cocked the hammer. "Do it now, before it's too late, or I'll shoot."

"And lose both of us?" Owen snorted derisively. Jack was bluffing, and doing it poorly. "You wouldn't."

"Tosh doesn't deserve to die, not when you could save her. Isn't that why you joined Torchwood, because you wanted to make a difference?" Now the tone of his voice was suddenly pleading, full of desperation. It wasn't a sound Owen associated with Jack Harkness, and it somehow broke his heart a little and filled him with profound embarrassment at the same time. While he wouldn't have batted an eyelash at seeing the other man naked (and, in fact, he had on more than one occasion), this was somehow worse, more of an intrusion upon his privacy than seeing him nude ever could have been. "Wouldn't you have saved Katie if you'd had the chance?"

He'd half expected Jack to invoke her name, but the words still stabbed like knives. Owen swept an instrument tray off the table in frustration, the stainless steel implements clattering to the floor and shattering the silence. "Don't you fucking pull that on me, Jack Harkness," he snarled, his anger rising. "Ask me to do something that's against my nature, sure, something that's practically anathema to any werewolf, but don't you ever fucking try to guilt me into doing anything by mentioning Katie. As far as I'm concerned, you don't even deserve to say her name."

He would have done anything to save Katie, as Jack knew full well, but he wasn't even sure that changing her would have done it. The alien parasite in her brain would have kept growing, and he didn't think that the shift from human to wolf would have affected it. Sure, she might not have died from the gas it had emitted during her surgery, but it still would have been there, and he'd lost her by that point anyway. She hadn't even been able to remember his name by the end.

Owen gripped the edge of the table, staring down at Tosh. The monitors were starting to emit warning beeps as her vitals sank lower; she didn't have much time left. Jack was right: he'd become a doctor to save people, because he'd hoped that if he saved enough, his own life might someday be worth something. He'd lost Katie, lost Diane, and while he didn't feel the same way about Tosh, he didn't want to watch her slip away like this. 

Silently, he began to remove his clothes, setting them aside. It was bloody cold in the Hub, as always, and his skin prickled into gooseflesh. He half expected Jack to make some sort of ribald remark, being Jack, but the other man looked on in silence. "You probably don't want to watch this," Owen told him. He still couldn't bring himself to look into his eyes. Jack had been right, damn him, but he'd won the argument at a cost. That was how Jack operated, though; he didn't care what he had to do, as long as he won.

"I've got a pretty strong stomach, believe me."

Owen thought about telling him that the transformation wasn't especially grotesque to watch, just – well, discomforting was the only way to describe it. He'd watched people change before, back in London, and he'd averted his eyes after the first time. There was something about a body twisting and contorting itself as someone changed from human to wolf that was profoundly uncomfortable to watch. 

It was hard to initiate the change; the full moon left him with a peculiar sort of exhaustion, one that ran bone-deep, and he had to fight to concentrate enough. Every instinct he had was shouting at him, but Owen ignored them all. He and Jack had wasted enough time arguing, and if he was going to change Tosh, it had to be now. Finally, the shift began, though it was slower than usual; every second felt like an eternity to him. He wished he could have just done the job as a human – it certainly would have been easier, but Owen didn't know what happened when a werewolf bit someone while they were human, and he didn't want to risk Tosh finding out.

When it was done, he reared up on his hind legs, placing his forepaws on the table, and nuzzled Tosh's arm, whining apologetically. He'd never wanted to do this to another person, let alone Tosh, but he couldn't lose someone else, either. He gingerly took her arm between his teeth and bit down gently, just hard enough to break the skin. It didn't have to be a serious wound, as far as he knew – any bite was supposed to work. He licked the blood away gently, trying not to think about the fact that it was Tosh's blood in his mouth, trying not to think about what he'd just done to her. They'd both have to face the reality of it tonight, but right now, all Owen wanted was to pretend it hadn't happened and sleep the rest of the day away. He wondered for a moment if he could just stay a wolf and curl up in one of the cells, perhaps – had Jack sent Gwen home? Was Ianto back in the tourism office? What would happen if he was still a wolf when the moon rose? No, he concluded, it would be better to just change back now and pass out on the sofa.

"That's it?" Jack asked Owen once he was human again, clearly disappointed with the entire process.

"What, did you expect her to change into a wolf on the spot?" Owen pulled his clothes back on, suddenly even more exhausted than he had been before. He knew that changing in quick succession was draining, but he'd never done it when he was already worn out from the full moon – and if this was how it felt, then he swore he'd never do it again.

"I expected her to wake up," Jack retorted. "How do we know it did anything?"

"Because it doesn't fail." At least, he'd never heard of it happening. A quick glance at the monitors showed that her vitals had not only improved, they were holding steady; that was all he wanted. "Look, when I was changed, I had a fucked-up shoulder and bruised ribs for a week and a half till the next full moon. It doesn't kick in right away, it just...keeps you from dying, I guess. She'll be better after tonight." And they were bloody lucky the full moon was tonight; Owen wasn't sure what would have happened if they'd had to wait. She probably would have spent the whole time in a coma, and he didn't know what sort of permanent effect that might have had on her, if the lycanthropy would have compensated for it or not. He'd tested his blood several times since he'd started working at Torchwood, but he'd never been able to figure anything out, even with the aid of technology enhanced by scavenged alien artefacts.

"What happened to you?" Jack furrowed his brow in confusion. Obviously he'd never stopped to consider how Owen had become a werewolf – but then again, Owen thought, he was self-centred like that. 

"I was attacked," he said shortly as he bandaged Tosh's arm. "By a feral werewolf hiding in an abandoned car park. It knocked me to the ground and chewed the hell out of my shoulder; I was lucky, and someone else shot it before it killed me. What, do you think I chose to have this happen to me? Because I didn't." He'd been a terrified kid during his first change, half convinced he was dying as his body shifted from one form to the other. He'd never felt so much pain in his life. The pain never lessened, but he'd become used to it over time, or as used to it as one could be. "Mind," Owen added, "there are some nutters who do choose it; pretty much everyone is either a hereditary werewolf, or they're changed by choice. Biting someone without their permission is-" Well, it was a form of violation, plain and simple. "It doesn't happen in polite werewolf society. There are traditions and rules and all sorts of shit, dating back centuries. I don't know half of them, but I do know that. The only people turned against their will are the ones who end up attacked, like me, and it's very rare, from what I've been told."

"Werewolves can breed?" Jack looked surprised at this information.

"You make it sound like we're animals or something." Which, technically, they were once a month, but still. He wasn't going to be insulted by the likes of Jack Harkness. "The offspring of a werewolf and a human are nearly always human – the lycanthropy gene, not that it's an identifiable gene, is recessive. A werewolf and a werewolf will always have werewolf children." The problem was that it wasn't genetic; he'd analysed his own DNA often enough, and he hadn't been able to find a single difference. It didn't make any sort of scientific sense. Tosh, he thought, would probably go mental trying to figure it out.

"Puppies." He smirked at Owen, clearly thinking that he was amazingly clever and witty. Owen contemplated punching Jack right in his smarmy grin, but decided against it. That was really more effort that he wanted to exert right now. 

"I wouldn't recommend saying that to a werewolf's face," he said instead, "immortal or not." Because most of the werewolves he knew wouldn't take an insult like that too well. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go pass out for a few hours. Wake me around-" he glanced at a clock "- three o'clock. Assuming Tosh isn't conscious by nightfall, and I don't think she will be, we'll have to get out of the city together. If Ianto's still here, have him find a change of clothes for her." He had no intention of undressing Tosh before she changed, after all, and he hoped she wasn't particularly attached to the outfit she had on; the transformation wasn't terribly kind to clothing. 

"Can't you just stay in the cells?" Another stupid question that made it sound like they were dumb animals – although, to be fair, the portrayal of werewolves in mass media was probably mostly responsible for that misconception. They were almost universally slavering, mindless beasts; in reality, Owen was in perfect control of himself when he was in wolf form, and just as intelligent as he was when he was a human, just with a slightly altered set of instincts.

Owen gave Jack a withering look as he started to head up the stairs. "No," he said, "that's a daft idea. She won't need to be restrained, and I don't want to be cooped up all bloody night. You can stand by to make sure nothing goes wrong, and after that, I'll make sure she gets back to the SUV in the morning. Easy enough." Easier than his first time, when he'd been entirely alone and overwhelmed by his heightened senses and lupine instincts.

"How do I know if something's wrong?"

"Well, if she tries to rip your throat out, that's a pretty good indication," Owen retorted over his shoulder. Though he sounded casual enough, the thought of it happening made his stomach twist into knots. Surely, he told himself, it wouldn't happen to Tosh. She would make it through it fine, just as he had – better, even, because she would have him there to keep an eye on her. "If that happens, you'll have to use the bullets I gave you. Like I told you, if a werewolf goes feral, they have to be put down." He wondered if Jack had realised that there was a flaw to his solution, that it might not work even after he'd bitten her. No, he thought, Jack had just been desperately grasping at straws, because he was too bloody stubborn to let any of his team members go. Not that he wanted to lose Tosh any more than Jack did, but he knew that these things happened, that nearly everyone in Torchwood died before the age of forty. It was an inevitability; someday, there would probably be something in this job that would even manage to kill him.

With that reassuring thought, he sank down on the sofa and fell asleep almost as soon as he'd closed his eyes.

The next thing Owen knew, Jack was shaking him awake. "All right, all right," he mumbled. "I'm getting up." He wanted to sleep longer – for about a week or so, in fact – but he knew that if he didn't get up soon, he would have to change right here in the Hub, which wouldn't be enjoyable for anyone involved. He sat up, stretching and yawning. "How's Tosh been doing?"

"No change." The look in Jack's eyes was grim, and his mouth was set firmly in a line. "She's just...holding."

"Holding is good. It's better than declining," he reminded Jack. "And a hell of a lot better than massive organ failure, which is what she was headed for before you made me go along with your demented plan." He was still a little irritated that Jack had coerced him into doing it. He'd changed Tosh's life forever, against her will, and he just hoped he hadn't ruined it entirely.

Owen disconnected her from the monitors that had been tracking her vitals all day. She looked frail there on the table, unpleasantly like she was already dead and just waiting for Owen to cut her open. He wasn't used to Tosh appearing so fragile, and it worried him more than he was willing to let on. She felt light in his arms when he picked her up in a fireman's carry, but he could feel her pulse fluttering just beneath her skin. It was there – weak, but steady – and that was all that mattered.

"Have you got clothes for her?" he asked Jack as he carried her to the SUV, carefully strapping her in. Jack held up a plastic bag to show Owen, sliding in behind the wheel. "You can just take us to the wetlands reserve – it's close enough, and nobody'll be there at night. No need to go out of the city proper." It was a hell of a lot easier to find open green space in Cardiff than it was in London. Not that it was absolutely necessary to have unless they wanted to hunt. Owen roamed the streets and back alleys most nights, but it was better to make sure that Tosh's first transformation occurred somewhere relatively deserted, just in case things went wrong. (After all, he thought morbidly, they wouldn't have anyone to do their cover-up work if they lost her.)

Nobody was around to see them carry an unconscious woman's body out of the SUV and into the reserve; Owen didn't want to think about what bystanders might assume. Dusk had fallen, and he crouched down on his heels next to Tosh once he'd taken his clothes off. "What time is it?" he asked Jack without looking up.

He heard Jack click the case of his pocketwatch open to check. "Five past seven."

It wasn't long now; Owen could feel the tug of the moon in his bones. It was like a siren's song, calling to him, and he fought to resist it. He needed to make sure that Tosh was all right first. "Come on," he muttered, his breath puffing in the air in front of him. "Come on, Toshiko."

"I can already see a full moon." He could hear the grin in Jack's voice, and he was about to make a sarcastic comment when Tosh's eyes snapped open. Her pupils dilated rapidly, and the irises changed colour to a brilliant gold. Owen let out a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding.

"Owen?" she whispered, and he could hear the fear and confusion in her voice.

"It's okay, Tosh." He wasn't sure how long he could hold his own change off, but he picked up her hand, squeezing it for a moment. "Just relax and let it happen. Everything's fine."

"I don't understand." She gasped in pain; he could see the bones starting to shift under her skin. "What's hap-" Tosh doubled up, clutching her stomach. "Owen-"

Owen stumbled away from her on legs that were threatening to break and reform, unable to stave it off any longer. Black fur sprouted from his skin for the second time that day. His joints shifted with an unpleasant scraping and crackling of cartilage, and he toppled to the ground with a grunt of pain. Though it was difficult, he managed to position himself so he could watch Tosh as she changed. She seemed fine so far, but the true test would be when the change was done. It was a possibility he didn't even want to consider, which, of course, meant it had been lurking in the back of his mind the whole time. 

He staggered to his feet and shook himself, trying to rid himself of the lingering sensation of the change. Owen had never shifted twice in one day before, and it felt strange in a way he couldn't quite place. Instead of dwelling on it, though, he looked around for Tosh; in the short time that he'd been unable to watch her, she had somehow managed to disappear. 

As it turned out, she hadn't gone far; she was cowering under a nearby bush, her entire body language shouting how afraid she was right now. Well, Owen couldn't blame her for that. She'd been unconscious all day, and she hadn't even known what to expect. She'd simply woken up and turned into a werewolf – he didn't even know if she realised who he was. He nosed in among the twigs, licking her muzzle in what was meant to be a reassuring gesture, but she recoiled from his touch.

Jack came up behind him, and Owen got a whiff of his pheromones as he turned to glance at him. It wasn't obvious when he was a human, even with his slightly enhanced senses, but in his wolf form, Jack practically screamed sex, like a bonfire blazing in the night. He wrinkled his nose, resisting the urge to paw at it and get the scent out. 

"Is she all right?" Jack asked quietly. It wasn't a question that had a simple yes or no answer, and Owen wasn't quite sure how to communicate his response. She was all right in the sense that she'd weathered the change and wasn't about to go around savaging everyone, which was probably what Jack was asking, but she wasn't all right emotionally. Owen tilted his head in a sort of shrug, figuring that was the best he could do.

"Okay, but is it safe to leave you two?" He wasn't sure what Jack was planning on doing all night, if he'd brought a book or- what did Jack do in his free time, anyway? Other than Ianto, who definitely wasn't there. He nodded, though it was strange to try and communicate in such a distinctly human way. Satisfied, Jack withdrew, presumably to go back to the SUV, and Owen turned his attention to Toshiko again. 

She was flattened close to the ground, as far under the bush as she could get; Owen, being larger, couldn't squeeze under quite as far, so he settled for just poking his head in. This sort of thing was easier in books, he thought, where werewolves usually had some sort of telepathic bond they could use to communicate. He whined deep in his throat, his ears pressed back close against his head. Tosh echoed his noise with a high-pitched whimper of her own; she looked a little surprised at the noises she found herself emitting. She shifted away from him as he drew closer, and if Owen had been human, he would have been swearing. Tosh was scared of him, and he didn't bloody know how to fix it. She probably thought that he was just another wolf, one who was bigger than she was and trying to encroach on her territory, and she was just obeying a set of instincts she didn't even realise she had.

It was time to take a different approach. Owen pulled his head back out from under the bush, leaving Tosh alone, and loped into the woods. She would be fine without him; there wasn't anything out here that posed a threat to a wolf. They were too close to the city for there to be any wildlife bigger than the odd fox. He nosed through the fallen leaves, trying to pick up the scent of a rabbit or squirrel, keeping his ears pricked for the sound of anything creeping through the brush. Finally, he startled a rabbit, and he managed to pounce on it just before it made it back to its warren. The taste of fresh blood filled his mouth, and his stomach growled with a hunger he hadn't even realised he had, but Owen had other plans for the rabbit.

He laid the limp body down in front of the bush and backed off slowly, waiting for Tosh to smell it. He knew the prospect of freshly killed game would be irresistible to her newly aroused wolf instincts, and it was almost certain to draw her out. Long minutes passed as Owen watched, and she finally crept out to sniff at the rabbit. Now that she was properly in the moonlight, he could tell that her fur was dappled, darker shades intermingling with lighter, as opposed to his own solid black coat. Her build was lighter than his, her body slenderer, and he thought she might be a little smaller, too. 

Tosh stared at him for a few moments before she lowered her head to eat, apparently satisfied that he wasn't going to attack her. Her bites were tentative, almost dainty, but the rabbit disappeared quickly enough, and she was left licking her chops clean. Once she finished that, she slunk closer to Owen step by step, her posture still submissive and afraid. He held still as she sniffed him cautiously, worried that any sudden movement might startle her. She moved around him in a slow circle, then suddenly lowered herself to the ground in front of him, rolling over to expose the lighter-coloured fur of her belly.

Bollocks, he thought, mentally groaning at the sign of submission. Some part of Tosh's wolfish instincts had decided that he was her alpha, which he most assuredly was not. It would probably be easy enough to straighten her out on that matter once they could actually speak again; he just hoped the concept wouldn't stick in her mind. Could newly changed werewolves imprint? He didn't actually know what the bond between a werewolf and the one who'd bitten them was like. Maybe this was perfectly normal behaviour, and he didn't have anything to worry about. 

Owen carefully nudged her ribs with his snout, encouraging her to get up. He didn't acknowledge her submission, hoping that if he just pretended she hadn't, she wouldn't get any ideas in her head. Not only did he not want to be an alpha, he didn't even want a pack. As far as he was concerned, Tosh could go on her merry way every full moon after this one. Being a lone wolf would probably suit her just as much as it did him – maybe even more, he thought, since Tosh wasn't much of one for company even when she was human.

Tosh scrambled to her feet and eyed him warily. While she wasn't afraid of him anymore, she still seemed hesitant and uncertain in her movements. Owen took a few steps past her, leading her into the trees, then glanced back over his shoulder, waiting for her to follow. The least he could do was help her grow more accustomed to her new form, and maybe even get her to relax a bit.

They returned to the clearing just before sunrise. Tosh's posture was more confident, and Owen felt a little better about the whole mess he'd landed her in. Not much better, to be fair, but it was a start. Jack was waiting for them, hands shoved in the pockets of his greatcoat; their clothes were waiting in neatly folded sets at his feet. Owen carefully picked up his own clothes and took them behind a bush, hoping Jack would have the decency to leave Tosh a bit of privacy while she changed. He shifted his weight from paw to paw while he waited, and as the sun crested the horizon, the pain of the shift wracked his body once again.

"What the hell is going on?" He heard Tosh's strangled cry as he pulled his jeans back on, and he came out from behind the bush, shirt in hand, to find her – thankfully – mostly clothed. 

"I- uh- there was an accident-" Owen stammered and averted his eyes as she pulled her own top on over her bra with trembling fingers. God, how the hell was he going to explain this to her?

"You bit me." Her tone was sharp and accusatory.

"I asked him to," Jack interceded, and Owen turned his head to find their fearless leader striding back into the clearing.

"You didn't give me much of a choice, as I recall," he muttered under his breath. Or any choice at all, to be precise, since Jack had threatened to shoot him.

"You didn't give me any choice in the matter, either," Tosh retorted angrily, and Owen felt a flash of guilt. He'd bloody well told Jack that was the entire problem with his stupid plan, and now Tosh was going to blame him for everything.

"You were dying, Toshiko. You triggered something in the artefact you were examining, and it nearly killed you. We didn't know what was happening, and there wasn't time to figure it out, so I asked Owen to save you the only way I knew how." And as they both knew, when Jack made a decision, there was no gainsaying him.

"Wait, hold on, did you know I was a werewolf?" It was Owen's most closely-guarded secret; Jack was the only person he'd ever actually told. He'd never even told Katie, though he'd always meant to do it before they got married.

"It wasn't exactly difficult to work out." Tosh's anger receded, and her voice was dry now. "I mean, you missed work every month on the full moon. How thick do you think I am, Owen?"

"I didn’t say you were thick," he protested, "I just didn't really expect you to leap to that particular conclusion."

Torchwood didn't know about werewolves; even Jack had been surprised when Owen had told him what he was. Sure, there had been something werewolf-like that had apparently led to the Institute's founding, but it had been one of a kind. Proper werewolves, the ones who had their own little society and hid what they were from the rest of the world, had been in Britain for ages - even if they weren't human, they weren't alien, and therefore they were outside of Torchwood's jurisdiction. Owen knew how little that would have meant if the wrong person had found out, but, as it stood, there was nothing in the Archives to suggest that anything like that had ever happened.

But Tosh was brilliant, there was no denying that, and she'd been working for Torchwood longer than he had. One of the things they'd learnt to do early on was to consider any possibility, no matter how unlikely it seemed. Just about anything was possible in their line of work, and it often was exactly what it looked like. In hindsight, he should have expected her to figure it out, but he was still a little annoyed that she had.

"I didn't tell any of the others," Tosh said quietly, glancing down at the ground. "I figured you were keeping it secret for a reason."

"Bloody hell," he grumbled. Owen suddenly realised that he was still holding his shirt in one hand, and he pulled it over his head quickly, feeling a little embarrassed. Running around shirtless was the sort of thing werewolves in trashy romance novels did; it wasn't for scrawny blokes in Wales who looked like they'd never seen the sun. "I haven't had nearly enough sleep to deal with this shit. Can we go home now?"

"You haven't explained anything yet, Owen." She folded her arms over her chest, giving him a stubborn look, but Owen was not to be dissuaded.

"Sleep first, Tosh, then explanations." He knew perfectly well that he owed that much to her, but he wanted to have a clear head while he was talking to her. "I'll tell you everything in due time, promise. I just want a few hours of shut-eye first." More than a few hours, really, but if there was one thing Torchwood had taught him, it was the difference between how much sleep he wanted and how much he was likely to get. "You can come over to mine for dinner tonight, we can have a chat then," he offered impulsively as he climbed into the front seat of the SUV. Jack glanced over at him, raising an eyebrow, but he wisely elected to stay silent.

"A-all right." Tosh was too taken aback by this offer to continue her argument, as he'd counted on – besides, he reckoned, she had to be nearly as exhausted as he was. She got into the SUV without further protest, and they returned to the Hub in silence.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the hits and kudos! This chapter is shorter than the previous one and ends in a slightly awkward place, thanks to writing everything in one big chunk originally. I split it where I did (at a point of view change, rather than a hard scene break) because otherwise I would have ended up with a chapter around 10,000 words long! Enjoy the chapter, and stay tuned for next Friday, when you'll get a lengthy dose of Jack and Tosh being awesome. :)

When Owen woke up, it was dusk again, and the city was lighting up outside his windows. The Senedd building glowed a burnished gold with illumination, and the reflection of the streetlights twinkled like fairy lights in the rippling waters of the Bay. He hadn't intended to sleep so late, but he was worn out from everything that had happened. At least the weariness that seemed to have seeped into his very bones had dissipated, though, and that was worth not having as much time to tidy up as he'd planned. He hadn't had anyone from work at his flat since- well, since Gwen, and she'd been too preoccupied with other things to notice his housekeeping skills (or lack thereof). He'd never wanted to have Tosh over at his flat, but he needed to talk to her, and it was the sort of conversation they couldn't exactly have where other people could overhear it.

So he got out of bed and began picking up his dirty clothes, chucking them into the hamper. He didn't think she was likely to end up in his bedroom, but Owen reckoned it was best to prepare for any eventuality. Once he was done in there, he moved on to the rest of the flat. The mess was the most personal thing about his flat; his furniture was all sleek and modern and looked exactly like he'd just bought whatever the salesperson at the store had told him to. Nothing looked lived-in, probably because it wasn't. He'd never been much of one for spending time at home; Torchwood didn't leave much room for leisure time, and even if he didn't go out on the pull much these days, he still went out to drink in clubs. But somehow he managed to spend enough time in his flat to leave the detritus of his daily life scattered around: dirty clothes, empty booze bottles, and the like.

In between straightening the magazines on his coffee table and making sure he had all the empty bottles cleared out of the living room, he ordered Chinese food for both of them. They'd shared enough meals at work that he already knew what she preferred, and it was easier to order ahead of time. The food arrived a few minutes before Tosh did; he had just set it down on the counter and was getting out utensils when she knocked on the door.

"Come on in," Owen greeted her as he opened the door. "Go ahead and sit anywhere – we can eat in the living room, or if you'd rather sit in the kitchen, that's fine, too." He felt uncharacteristically awkward; not only was having Tosh over for a nice little chat strange – hell, having anyone over for friendly conversation was strange, and he didn't think he'd had anyone come to his flat at all since Diane left – but the subject of the conversation wasn't exactly one he was used to discussing, either. 

"What do you want to drink?" he asked, peering at her over the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. "I've got beer, I think there might be some red wine of some sort..." All right, so he didn't exactly have many non-alcoholic beverages in his flat. "Water," he added lamely.

"Just beer is fine," she replied. Tosh looked tense; she was sitting on the edge of the sofa, and he could see that she was twisting her hands in her lap. He suspected that she wasn't any more comfortable being at his flat than he was with having her there. He'd never been to hers, either - he wasn't entirely certain where she lived, when it came down to it. Tosh was arguably the most reclusive of the lot of them, though there were times when Ianto could have given her a run for her money.

He handed her a couple of cartons of Chinese food and a pair of chopsticks. Owen had noticed that she never used a fork like the rest of them (save Ianto), probably because, unlike them, she was quite capable of using chopsticks. If he'd tried to do it, he would have ended up dropping most of his food on the table and floor, but Tosh somehow managed to be deft enough to keep from dropping so much as a grain of rice. 

Cracking both beers open, he passed one over to her and set his own down on the table as he settled down at the other end of the sofa. They ate in awkward silence for a few moments before Tosh swallowed her mouthful of chicken chow mein and spoke. "I'm sorry if I sounded harsh earlier, Owen. It was just- well, it was a bit of a shock, to say the least."

Owen shrugged her apology off, taking a swig of his beer. "You handled it better than most people would. Fuck, I don't know what I would've done in the same situation." There definitely would have been violence involved; Owen was rasher than Tosh was, and quicker to anger. Her anger was quiet and deliberate, ice to his fire; everything Tosh did was calculated precisely, even her rage. He couldn't imagine her getting pissed off at someone and taking a swing at them, even if they deserved it (as he so often did).

"Besides," he added, "you're right. You should have had a choice. That's why I didn't want to do it at first; one of the worst things a werewolf can do, in the eyes of other werewolves, is bite someone without their permission. It's an unthinkable violation. If I'd had any other options at all, trust me, I would have taken them." But she'd been dying, and Jack had been right, he couldn't afford to lose someone else, not when there was another way. "There wasn't time to figure out what was happening and find a way to counter it. Jack knew that changing you would save you." He hadn't realised how Owen felt about it, and Owen knew he wouldn't have cared if he had. 

"I do prefer this to being dead, though," she admitted. There was a hint of uncertainty to her words, and he didn't blame her. She didn't know much about what she'd been dragged into. "I'd thought the device I was examining was totally inert. Nothing had shown up on any of our scans. No toxicity, no radiation or harmful emissions – absolutely nothing. It should have been safe." But as they both knew, just because something seemed safe didn't mean it was, just that they didn't know which precautionary measures to take when handling it. He didn't blame her; in their line of work, virtually anything was likely to kill them at any given time, and there was no way of knowing when or what it would be. There was a damn good reason why almost no Torchwood agents survived to collect their pensions.

"Well, I kept the blood I drew from you. I'll run tests on it, see what I can figure out." Though he could only do that if it had been caused by any sort of substance that could be detected in her blood, and there was no way of telling if that was the case. It was quite likely that they'd never figure out what had happened to her, and the artefact she'd been examining would be relegated to the unsafe section of the vaults forever. "I'll have to give you a check-up when we're back at work, make sure that the change healed everything." He was sure it had, but he didn't want to tempt fate by not checking.

"How does it work?" she asked, wrinkling her brow in confusion. Tosh was the sort of person who had to know the how and why of everything. It was one of the reasons why she was so good at her job, but it could be damned annoying at times, too – especially when she didn't understand that most other people weren't as interested in knowing how things worked as she was.

"I don't know." He'd been dreading that question; he'd known from the beginning she was likely to ask about the science behind lycanthropy. "It's not a genetic mutation, or anything I've ever been able to pick up in any tests. It's just...there. It happens, and I haven't got any sort of explanation for it. All your bones break and reform, your entire anatomy changes...hell, Tosh, I've been through medical school, I know what should and shouldn't be possible, and this is bloody weird, even for Torchwood." It was the sort of thing that should have shown up in some sort of test results – especially with Torchwood's advanced equipment – but it wasn't. "I might not be your equal when it comes to physics and the like, but even you've got to admit, I do know my shit in my own field." 

"A medical genius is the term you like to use, I believe." One corner of her lips threatened to tug into a smile, and Owen felt a little reassured by that. It meant she was starting to relax around him – though, if their other conversations were any indication, it wouldn't last long. Usually, whenever that happened, one of them said or did something wrong (typically Owen), and Tosh would clam back up again and withdraw, or he would get pissed off and walk away. "Well, if you haven't been able to work it out, we'll just have to try harder. Two minds are better than one, after all."

Owen wasn't sure if there was anything that could be done, but he knew better than to mention that to Tosh. She was the one who'd worked out how to detect Rift energy, after all, and the one who'd refined the Rift Manipulator. Technology was her forte, and it was entirely possible she'd come up with something and manage to make him look like an idiot, as she so often did to all of them. Instead, he turned his attention to his food again, trying to shovel some more of it into his mouth before it got too cold.

"If turning people against their will is frowned upon, then how do people become werewolves?" she asked as she twirled noodles around her chopsticks.

"As far as I know, which isn't very far, it's a pretty even split between hereditary werewolves and people who've found out about it somehow and choose to become werewolves. I've never understood why anyone would want to do that, though; I mean, yeah, you're practically invulnerable and you have a longer lifespan, but you're choosing to alienate yourself from everyone you've ever known and loved in the process by keeping such a massive secret from them. Every month, you go through the worst pain imaginable three nights in a row. You have these wolf instincts to cope with, changing from a rational, civilised human being into a wild animal. And there's always the chance that you'll snap and go feral. A feral werewolf is one who's gone mad; the wolf takes over, and you can't become human again. There's no cure for it."

"There's no cure for a lot of things," Tosh said quietly, glancing down into her carton of food. "Everyone's got to die sometime, Owen. I nearly did yesterday. I think those people probably consider the risk worth the reward – like working for Torchwood. You know you're probably going to die at a young age, but you end up seeing so many things that you never would have known about otherwise. I wouldn't give it up for the world. I'm not sure I'd say the same thing about lycanthropy, but it's got to have benefits for some people."

"It's not just dying, Tosh, it's the chance of putting other people at risk first." Owen set his food aside for a moment to pull his shirt off, revealing the scarring on his right shoulder. If she'd noticed it that morning, she hadn't commented on it. "I was attacked by a feral werewolf when I was sixteen years old. He probably would have killed me if someone hadn't shot him with a silver bullet. My only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and because of that, I ended up like this." He tugged his shirt back over his head, running a hand over his hair to smooth it back into place. "I was just a fucking kid, all right? I was scared and hurt and alone. I didn't want to become a werewolf any more than I ever wanted to find out about the existence of aliens. I could've just lived my entire life happy and completely fucking oblivious." 

"No, I don't think you could have." Tosh rested her chin on her hand as she studied Owen thoughtfully. "Jack chose all of us because we weren't the sort of people predisposed to living like that. We question things, Owen, because even without knowing about aliens, we aren't just content to be part of the herd, because we have the sort of minds that pick up things that are out of the ordinary and we don't accept the explanations people try to foist off on us. Blissful ignorance isn't a state that suits anyone like us. Nobody wants to be forced out of it, but the fact remains, it wouldn't have lasted for long."

"Bullshit." Owen snorted derisively. "And totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand, which is that being a werewolf is utter shit." 

"Irrelevant because neither of us had any choice in the matter. Our lives were irrevocably changed, and that's a fact we've got to deal with. A fact I've got to deal with," she corrected herself, though Owen wasn't sure she'd been wrong in the first place. "So if you could try to be slightly more optimistic about the situation just to make me feel better, I'd really appreciate it, Owen." He didn't bother to point out that if she wanted optimism, she was asking the wrong person; he knew Tosh was intimately familiar with his pessimistic outlook on life. Tosh was slipping out of her previously relaxed state, just like Owen had predicted, and her words were beginning to acquire that icy edge of irritation. 

"How long have you known, Tosh?" he asked abruptly. It was something that had been bothering him since earlier that morning, lurking at the back of his mind.

"Known?" Tosh looked surprised by his question. "That you were a werewolf? I suppose I figured it out a few months after you started working at Torchwood. Why?"

"You knew, and you still-" Owen wasn't quite sure how to define Tosh's feelings for him. It wasn't anything they'd ever spoken about – not with Tosh being the way she was - but he would have had to be an idiot not to know about it. 

She compressed her lips into a thin line and glanced away, refusing to meet his eyes. "We don't need to talk about this, Owen." Her tone was short, and he knew that he shouldn't press the issue, but he kept going anyway.

"Who in their right mind would fancy a werewolf?" he scoffed. "Why would you ever look at me and go 'oh, he turns into a wild beast once a month, clearly he's a brilliant fucking choice to want to shag'? I mean, yeah, I get that there's an entire romance novel genre based on just that, but this is the real world, Tosh, and nobody fucking tames a werewolf. It's not safe or cosy, it's not romantic, it's fucked up. I'm not even human – which, all right, apparently isn't something you give a shit about anyway, but it's not the sort of thing that ever works out like it does in those shitty books. You want to know something? When I told Jack about what I was, I gave him silver bullets for his gun in case he needed to kill me someday. Werewolves are monsters, Toshiko, plain and simple."

"I've always known you were insensitive, Owen, but now you've gone past that and well into the realm of being a complete idiot." Tosh glared at him, though he thought saw tears shining in her eyes as well. "If there's one thing that Jack's tried to teach us in all these years of working at Torchwood, it's that someone who isn't human is still a person. Of course you're dangerous, but that doesn't mean that you're a monster, or that I'm a monster now, too. I thought- well, it doesn't matter what I thought at the beginning, but trust me, there have been times where I wished I could have had feelings for anyone else. Not because you're a werewolf, mind, but because you're you – because you're deliberately cruel and thoughtless and all you ever try to do is push away anyone you're afraid might possibly want to get close to you. I saw you do it to Suzie and Gwen, and god knows you've said more than enough to hurt me in the past. There have been times when I've hated you, Owen, because you always know just what to say to cause the most damage. What you turn into has never bothered me; what you are has caused me more pain than that ever could."

"So, what, you want me to be something I'm not? I've never been nice, Tosh, and I'm not going to start just to make you happy." He didn't want any of this; he'd never wanted Tosh to fall for him in the first place. He'd spent years pushing her away, pointedly ignoring all of her tentative advances, and he was worried that since he'd changed her into a werewolf, he wouldn't be able to keep her at a distance any longer. Most women were just interested in him for sex, and Owen had been fine with that, but Tosh- well, she wasn't the sort of woman who went for one-night stands. Besides, he wasn't into that sort of thing anymore...but he didn't think he could be what she wanted, either.

"Do you really think that's what I want?" Tosh shook her head and stood, picking up her handbag. "You don't know me at all, Owen – not that I ever expected anything else from you."

"You can't just leave!" Owen protested. He didn't know why he wanted her to stay when the conversation had turned to shit, but he felt vaguely guilty about the whole thing.

"Why not? It's obvious that you aren't going to tell me anything useful about any of this, so I don't see why I ought to stay and continue to be insulted. I don't need you; I'm quite capable of figuring things out myself." And with that, she turned and walked out, leaving Owen a little dumbfounded. It was, perhaps, the angriest he'd ever seen Tosh – certainly the only time she'd ever walked out on him, rather than vice versa, although it wasn't as if he could have walked out of his own flat and left her there.

Instead, he stared blankly at the cartons of food growing cold on his coffee table. He honestly hadn't expected things to turn out the way they had; he'd only meant to talk to her about what it was like to be a werewolf and explain how things worked. But he'd managed to put his foot in it yet again. He'd deliberately provoked Tosh in the past, and it seemed that old habits really did die hard, because he'd slipped right back into saying precisely what he knew would hurt her without even meaning to do so. He didn't have the slightest idea how he was going to make things better with Tosh now, and worse yet, it had taken him entirely too long to come to the conclusion that he wanted to fix it.

 

Though Owen had asked for an extra day off – he had spent one of his days off at work, after all, even if he'd been sleeping for most of that time – Jack had, unsurprisingly, denied his request. He wasn't in the best of moods when he returned to work the next day; Owen had spent most of the night tossing and turning, feeling uncharacteristically guilty for the way he'd treated Tosh. As he went to go fetch a mug of coffee, he was surprised by Ianto stepping in between him and the coffee machine.

"What the hell did you do to Tosh, Owen?" Though his accusation was quiet, there was a hint of steel behind his words. 

"What do you mean?" Owen tried to figure out if there was a way to derail this conversation, get his coffee, and spend the rest of the workday hiding safely in the autopsy bay. Ianto wasn't the sort of person who took him to task for anything – with the exception of occasional whinging about late paperwork, which he usually disregarded. While he'd half expected some sort of bollocking if anyone found out about the way he'd treated Tosh, he'd figured it would come from Jack, not their usually mild-mannered teaboy.

"She won't talk about it, but there's obviously something wrong, and if Tosh is upset about something, then there's at least a fifty percent chance that you're the one to blame." No, Ianto was very much in the way and preventing Owen from getting his necessary infusion of caffeine.

"Maybe it's the wrong time of the month," Owen tried to joke weakly.

"The full moon has nothing to do with you being an arsewipe." Ianto rolled his eyes. "Though it has everything to do with Tosh's sudden recovery, I imagine."

"That depends on what Tosh told you," he ventured cautiously. Surely she hadn't been so imprudent as to confess everything to Ianto; Torchwood was a secretive bunch by nature, and Tosh, as far as he knew, rarely told anyone anything.

"It wasn't exactly difficult to work out, Owen," Ianto scoffed. "Jack shoos the rest of us out to call you in during the full moon, and two days later, Tosh turns up again, perfectly healthy? Come on, it doesn't get more obvious than that."

"Christ, does everybody fucking know?" Owen felt rather irritated about the whole thing. He'd spent years trying to hide what he was from his teammates, and they'd gone and figured it out on their own anyway. Of course he'd ended up in the one line of work where they were encouraged to accept the most absurd and implausible answers to a problem as entirely likely. 

"I don't think Gwen does." Ianto shrugged. "Anyway, I don't care about your furry little problem, Owen. What I care about is that you've really fucked up with Tosh this time."

"When I want a bloody lecture from you, teaboy, I'll ask for it." And they both knew that would never happen. "But since you just spent months pining after Jack only to throw yourself at him the second he showed up again, you'll forgive me if I don't solicit any sort of relationship advice from you."

Ianto gave Owen a dark look for just a moment before the polite mask he was used to slipped back into place. "All right, then, you'd better get to work. You've got a long day ahead of you."

Owen was perplexed by Ianto's sudden change of mood; he figured he'd been in for a lecture. He stepped forward to get his coffee, but Ianto blocked him deftly, raising one eyebrow in a silent warning. Suddenly, Owen got it: if he was going to be a prick, then he wouldn't get any coffee.

"Fuck you, Jones," he muttered under his breath.

"Oh, no, I assure you, Jack does a better job of it than you ever could," Ianto told Owen, his voice calm and even. Owen growled wordlessly in response, turning away from Ianto and the coffee machine and stalking out into the main Hub.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're switching to Tosh's point of view for a bit of action (and a lot of conversation with Jack) this week. Thanks for reading, everyone! I welcome any and all questions and feedback, so feel free to leave anything you might have in a comment.

Tosh didn't even bother looking up from her work when she heard Owen enter. She wasn't in any mood to speak to him at the moment, and she figured he felt much the same way about her, albeit for a different reason. Of course, Owen, being Owen, was usually quite happy not to speak to her at all. She'd thought lately that maybe his opinion of her was changing. His entire demeanour had certainly changed since he'd lost Diane; she'd managed to get close to him in a way that nobody else had in the entire time Tosh had known him, and losing her had very nearly broken him entirely. But he'd picked himself back up, as they all had after losing the people they'd loved, and he'd moved on, and Tosh had nurtured the faintest glimmer of hope-

But that didn't matter. She was wrong about it, just as foolish and naïve as she'd always been. Of course she'd known he was a werewolf for ages, but she shouldn't have let on that she was aware of his secret. He was right, there probably was something wrong with her for falling in love with a werewolf; there was definitely something wrong with her for continuing to love someone who broke her heart with every deliberately chosen insult.

Tosh knew why he pushed people away, of course. The other thing she'd never admitted to him was that she'd always known what had led him to join Torchwood – she had, after all, been the one who had edited the security camera video of his fiancée's surgery and planted the cover stories for those who had been killed by the alien in her brain. Her first glimpse of Owen hadn't been when she'd met him in the Hub on his first day of work, it had been on the grainy security camera footage that had caught him pacing outside the operating room. She hadn't fallen in love with him right then and there; that would have been completely mental, even if Tosh had been the love at first sight sort. But the fact remained that the entire situation was a level of screwed up that could only be attained if one worked for Torchwood.

She'd never meant to feel that way about him, and it certainly hadn't happened out of nowhere. Over time, Tosh had found herself noticing little things about Owen, putting the pieces of his puzzle together and realising that he was terribly lonely, that so much of what he said and did was a front, a brash exterior to hide the fact that he didn't think much of himself. She had never been good at figuring people out, but step by step, she'd managed to work out more about Owen than he consciously realised himself. Eventually, she'd come to realise that she had fallen in love with him, whether she'd wanted to or not.

Years later, nothing had come of it, and she doubted it ever would. In that time, he'd slept with Suzie and Gwen, but he'd never given her so much as a look to imply that he might think of her that way. Oh, she'd heard his brief speculation of what she might be like in bed – 'Catholic, but grateful' – but she knew all too well that she was quite possibly the only woman in Cardiff that he had no interest in shagging. He'd made that clearer than ever last night, and it still smarted this morning. Tosh usually kept her emotions to herself, but her emotional tumult had been too much for her to hide. Even Gwen had been able to tell that she was in a foul mood. Luckily, Ianto had drawn her aside for a cup of tea and a few words, trying to soothe her in his own quiet way.

As she worked on removing the snarls from a particular tricky bit of code she'd been developing for several days, Tosh thought about her recently gained lycanthropy. She'd already scoured the databases for any mention of werewolves, but she hadn't had any luck outside of the story of the Torchwood Institute's founding – and that was little more than hearsay from the earliest days of Torchwood. Apart from Owen, who obviously wasn't inclined to help her, she was entirely on her own. 

Tosh was used to an isolated existence, but something about this situation struck her as even lonelier than usual. Maybe it was because wolves were innately social creatures; maybe her new lupine instincts yearned for a pack to run with. Owen obviously didn't have a pack, though, which meant that so-called lone wolves had to exist among werewolves. He'd spent time with her when she'd first changed – she thought of the gentleness of which he'd treated her when she'd been terrified half out of her mind and not entirely certain of what had happened to her. It was hard to resolve it with the way he acted toward her the rest of the time; she knew he was capable of being a decent human being, no matter how much he denied it, but he almost never showed her any sort of kindness. No, she didn't expect him to spend any more full moons with her.

However, she had nearly a month to figure out what she would do during the next full moon, so she turned her mind to other things – though she also spared a moment to block Owen's internet access. Between that and Ianto's plan to deprive him of coffee, she felt a little bit better about things. She wasn't a vengeful person by nature, but there was no denying that he deserved the discomfort. Maybe he could actually work for once instead of shopping on eBay, as he so often did. (In fact, that was one of his more work-appropriate activities, judging by his internet usage log.)

"Toshiko!" Jack swooped down on her and interrupted her brown study with one of those patented smiles that was meant to make you feel like you were the only person who mattered. Thankfully, she'd developed a necessary immunity to them early on – back when she and Jack had been the only members of Torchwood – and so she simply raised an eyebrow at him, not in any sort of mood to entertain his playful flirtations. "Just the woman I wanted to see! Grab your coat, we're going shopping."

A shopping trip with Jack was, she suspected, not a shopping trip at all, but rather Torchwood business – unless he'd spoken to Ianto and wanted to get her out of the Hub so they could have a chat about Owen. But Jack rarely seemed inclined to interfere in their personal lives, so Tosh assumed it was work-related. At any rate, she didn't want to stick around the Hub all morning, especially not once Owen discovered his lack of internet access. She locked her computer (in case Owen thought he could get around her block by using it while she was gone), collected her coat, and followed Jack to the SUV.

"He didn't explain anything to you, did he?" Jack asked, glancing over at her before he turned his attention to backing the SUV out of its parking space.

Tosh shrugged. "Our conversations never last long, Jack. I'm sure you've noticed." They'd all spent enough time working together in the Hub that she would have been more surprised if he hadn't. Jack was usually good at picking up on the subtle nuances of interaction between his teammates.

"I really am sorry, Tosh. If I could've done anything else-" Jack's hands tightened on the steering wheel, betraying the inner conflict he must have felt over the decision he'd been forced to make. "But I couldn't lose you. I think Owen feels the same way, though he obviously isn't admitting it."

Tosh gave him a sceptical look. "You didn't hear what he said last night." While she didn't think Owen would have been happier with her dead, she didn't believe he cared much for her, either.

"Owen's a jackass," Jack pointed out. "You know that as well as I do – better, probably. He's confused about how he feels, and that makes him treat you like shit. I'll punch him for you if you think it'll make you feel better."

Tosh doubted that Owen was at all conflicted in his emotions toward her, but Jack seemed convinced, and she figured it was better not to question him. "Ianto's already refusing to give him coffee," she replied lightly. "In the long run, I think that'll hurt him far more than any blows might."

"Ouch." He winced. "Remind me to never piss Ianto off – I shudder to think what he'd do to me."

"Deprive you of rather more than coffee, I imagine." She knew quite well what Jack and Ianto got up to on their own time; the security footage in the Hub was proof of that fact. 

"Yeah, but the caffeine deprivation would be worse than the rest of it." He sighed theatrically. "Well, probably. He does do this thing with his tongue-"

"Jack." Tosh cut him off with a sharp look. "I really don't need to hear about Ianto's technique."

"Not when you can watch it, anyway."

Tosh fell silent, blushing a bright red as she pretended to be fascinated by something outside the car window. Trust Jack to know that she occasionally indulged in watching the illicit liaisons he had in the Hub – though, now that she thought about it, that was probably the reason why he didn't cover his tracks. It was completely mortifying. "What are we looking for, Jack?" she asked finally, desperate to change the subject.

"Great deals?" Jack offered as they pulled into the parking lot of the mall. "I could use some new trousers, and I'm sure you're always on the lookout for another pair of shoes."

"Mine do get ruined with a shocking regularity," she agreed mildly. Theirs was a line of work that tended to be hard on all sorts of clothing, but particularly shoes. She'd stepped in a lot of bizarre things over the years. "But as much as I would love to go shoe shopping with you, I can't help but think that there's another reason why you've dragged me out here in the middle of the work day."

"Always perceptive, aren't you?" Jack beamed at her, jogging around to open the door of the SUV for her. "I knew there was a reason why I recruited you."

"Here I thought you did it to keep me from mouldering away in jail." While Tosh tried to make it sound like a light-hearted joke, the truth was, she knew she would have spent the rest of her life in UNIT's secure detention facility if Jack hadn't found her and offered her a job – and the rest of her life wouldn't have been very long. She'd spent several months in solitary confinement, and her sanity had been fraying around the edges by the time Jack had shown up like an angel in a military greatcoat.

"Oh, Toshiko, you were like a diamond shining brightly buried in the muck of prison. How could I have let that go to waste?" It was a topic they rarely mentioned, and Jack was more than willing to move on from it. "Anyway, scans from yesterday show a spike of alien tech use around here – every hour on the hour, but only during business hours. I figured I'd drag you out to see what we could find." Jack passed Tosh one of her handheld energy detectors. "If anybody asks, we're-"

"-Health and safety," Tosh finished. "Checking up on radon levels present in the mall. Honestly, Jack, do give me some credit. I've been doing this long enough that I've got all the excuses down pat." While she wasn't normally Jack's first choice for fieldwork these days, she'd been part of the team when he hadn't had any other options. "Just like old times," she murmured, thinking of when they'd worked as partners.

"The good ol' days, back when we were run ragged," Jack agreed. "You miss 'em, Tosh?"

There had been a certain intimacy to working with just Jack – not of the sexual kind, though she had no doubt that he would have indulged her had she ever made her interest plain. Jack was perhaps the only person who'd ever truly appreciated her for who she was, the only person who'd seen the value in what she was capable of doing. They'd made a good team with just the two of them; she'd felt more comfortable with only one other person. But they were more efficient with five team members, better at doing their jobs and keeping Cardiff safe.

"Sometimes, but we're better off with you running the show and me working my magic from behind the scenes." Besides, it had been exhausting with only two of them; they'd never got a break. Jack didn't seem to need one – the only time he'd missed work in Tosh's entire tenure with Torchwood was when he'd disappeared for several months – but Tosh was only human (had only been human, she corrected herself bitterly), and she wasn't capable of working nonstop, no matter how often she liked to pretend otherwise.

"Good girl," he praised her. "So, you picking anything up right now?"

Tosh glanced down at her handheld device. "Negligible background levels of bog standard Rift energy."

"Bog standard? Is that a scientific term?"

"It is when I'm the one defining the science," Tosh retorted. Part of her job involved studying the Rift and its energy output, building on more than a century of Torchwood's research. She'd made leaps and bounds since she'd started four years ago, but all that it had done was convince her that there was still so much more she had yet to discover. Twenty-first century Earth physics still worked primarily in three dimensions, and so Tosh found herself pushing the boundaries of knowledge on a regular basis. If she'd been in the scientific world, she would have been hailed as a pioneer and a genius; as it was, she knew her work would end up buried in the vaults once she was gone, never even acknowledged by anyone outside Torchwood.

"See, if I were you, I'd name units of measurement after myself – like a Harkness of energy. Doesn't that sound like a nice word?" Jack paused for a moment to examine a suit in a shop window. 

Tosh thought that any unit of measurement named after Jack would have to involve sex – perhaps something attempting to quantify orgasmic energy – but she knew from experience that encouraging him was precisely the last thing she ought to do. "Ianto hates suits off the rack," she said instead, "and I'm not sure that shade of green matches your colouring. Stick with blue. Blue is a safe colour."

"You never get anywhere by being safe, Toshiko, especially when it comes to fashion. Besides, I look good in any colour."

"You've never heard Ianto complain about that green shirt, then." Tosh rolled her eyes.

"Maybe I want something that he's eager to get me out of." Jack raised an eyebrow at her.

"You want something that doesn't put him off entirely, Jack, and could you please save your fashion consultations for someone else? We do have work to do, you know." Tosh wasn't exactly the most fashionable member of the team, or the best when it came to trying to seduce others.

"All right, all right," he relented, letting her tug him away from the window. "Maybe I'll just stick with the usual."

"You mean nothing at all?"

"Well, I meant my coat, but that works too. So, what happened with you and Owen, anyway?" he continued smoothly, changing the topic again.

"The same thing that always happens with Owen." Tosh shrugged, pretending to be absorbed in the readings from her device. "Things went downhill, we fought, I walked out. I'm not usually the one who walks away from our conversations, but we were at his flat, so it wasn't as if he could leave." In truth, it was the first time she'd got angry enough with him to end the conversation; normally, Owen just got annoyed with her or bored, or he wandered off of his own volition to do something else. Tosh bore the brunt of his cruel remarks without saying or doing anything.

"You walked out on him?" Jack knew how uncharacteristic this was for her, too, and he hadn't even been privy to most of their late-night conversations at the Hub. 

Tosh was silent as she wondered how much she wanted to share with Jack. "He said that I was screwed up for feeling the way I did about him and knowing that he was-" She couldn't bring herself to say it, not when they were in public like this. "Well. You know. He called himself a monster."

"Oh, that must've been reassuring for you." Jack shook his head. "Like I said, Owen's an idiot. Give him time, he'll come 'round."

"And what if I don't want to give him time?" Because for once in her life, she wasn't sure she did. She was starting to think he'd finally pushed her one step too far.

"Then that's your decision." Stooping to check a plant in a large planter, Jack brushed the leaves aside with one hand. "It's hard, though, knowing that you're different from someone you're...interested in. Or someone who's interested in you. Owen probably wonders why anyone who knows about his particular condition would want to be with someone like him. There's the danger involved, the fear that someday things might change and you might suddenly find him repulsive, the fact that he doesn't age like a normal person does- seriously, am I close to finding this thing yet?"

Tosh realised suddenly that Jack wasn't just talking about Owen; the same thing had to apply to his relationships as well, so this particular issue was one that must hit close to home for him. "I'm not a freak," she murmured. "And it's not in there," she added, raising her voice.

Jack straightened up again, reaching out to cup Tosh's cheek with one hand. "You aren't a freak or a monster or anything else, Toshiko. You're still you, no matter what you are, and loving someone in spite of what they are doesn't make you screwed up. It's an admirable trait, trust me, because I've been around more than enough people who aren't like that." He leaned in and pressed a kiss to her forehead. "The offer to punch Owen still stands, by the way."

She smiled sadly at him before she stepped back. "I don't think violence will solve anything, but it's nice of you to offer." She'd felt like punching Owen herself often enough, but at this point, Tosh wasn't even sure if there was anything left to fix. 

"I think the signal's coming from over there." Tosh gestured toward an empty storefront that had been covered up with signs proclaiming that a new bookstore was opening soon. Glancing around, she saw a small corridor a couple of stores down; that had to lead somewhere nearby, she figured. She beckoned for Jack to follow her, trying to look as official as possible as she headed into the depths of the mall.

"This place is awfully busy," Jack mused, stopping in front of the door that led to the empty storefront. "Not quite as big a crowd as you'd expect at Christmas, but definitely more people than would normally be shopping at ten a.m. on a- what is today, Thursday? Still, at least it means none of the employees are back here to watch us engaging in a bit of breaking and entering."

Tosh handed Jack her device as she bent down to study the lock, pulling a set of picks from her bag. "Good thing. It would be difficult to explain why anyone from health and safety needs to pick locks." She manipulated the tools with a deftness born of experience; while picking locks wasn't a skill she'd had before she'd started working for Torchwood, she'd become rather good at it over time. It was, she thought wryly, the sort of talent a person with a criminal record should never admit to – though no one but Jack knew about her past. "Ah, there we go!" she crowed triumphantly as the lock clicked open.

"Ladies first." Jack swept an arm in front of him. Tosh pulled a torch from her bag and clicked it on before she entered cautiously, passing a second torch to Jack.

The beam of weak torchlight revealed plenty of metal shelves and clothes racks covered with plastic sheeting – nothing out of the ordinary. Tosh stepped forward, keeping one eye on the readout from her device; Jack, she knew from experience, was sure to have his gun to hand already, in case anything popped out to surprise them. She was so intent on looking for signs of life in the shadows that she wasn't paying attention to where she put her feet, and Tosh tripped over something small on the floor, losing her balance. The torch skittered off into a corner as Tosh fell, and her arm hit a shelving unit with an unpleasant crunching noise. It was a pure amateur move that had her silently castigating herself.

"Tosh?" Jack crouched down next to her. "You all right?"

"My pride is bruised, and I'm pretty sure my arm is broken," she gasped, tears of pain already starting to run down her face. "What did I trip over, anyway?" She frowned at the object illuminated by the beam of light from Jack's torch. "Do you think that's-"

He picked it up, tossing it in one hand. "Exactly what we're looking for. I should've worked it out earlier, to be honest. Standard Branthian compulsion device – illegal in half a dozen galaxies because it triggers an urge to shop in the cerebral cortex. Nothing major, mind, just a few more impulse buys here and there, nudging people to get something that they might ordinarily pass on. And it's got a tiiiiny chance of causing your brain to explode, but, really, the odds of that are something like one in ten million."

"Brains don't just explode, Jack," Tosh protested through gritted teeth.

"Well, you know, layman's terminology. Some people are just sensitive to the signals it emits, and the resonance from the device creates a build up of pressure and- okay, I'm not sure how it works, actually, but it looks pretty darn messy. Kind of like an explosion." Just as Jack started to help her up, something burst through the ceiling tiles, knocking him down onto the floor next to her.

"Shit!" Jack swore, fumbling with his gun. He'd holstered it in order to help Tosh, and now the alien had him pinned to the floor. Tosh couldn't see anything in the dark, and while she knew that she didn't have to worry about doing Jack any permanent harm if she fired her own gun, she didn't want to have to face the alien on her own, either. She fretted for a moment before a solution occurred to her. It wasn't something she'd tried previously, and she wasn't even sure how it worked, but she couldn't think of another way out. 

Tosh bit her lower lip to keep from crying out in pain as the change started; she already had one broken bone, and now the others were snapping one by one, grinding as they shifted into new positions. There had to be some sort of reduction in the level of pain somehow, she thought, or else everyone would black out in the middle of the change – obviously the pain receptors couldn't be deadened entirely, but something was blocking them, at least a little bit. She would have to ask Owen about it later, once she felt like speaking to him again. 

It seemed to take an eternity for the change to occur, though it couldn't have been much more than a minute; Tosh was waiting for the alien to leap on her while she was vulnerable in mid-shift, but it never happened. She scented the air, nearly sneezing at the unfamiliar smell that mingled with Jack's blood. Too much blood, she realised, and Jack was too quiet, and god, she hoped that thing wasn't busy eating him. (Could he come back from being eaten?) She wasn't as afraid as she'd been last time, but she was still nervous; she'd never hunted anything before, never fought anything as a wolf, and here she was, trying to take on an alien that was easily twice her size.

The alien darted past her, making for the door, and Tosh swore inwardly. The last thing they needed was an obviously vicious alien making its way through a crowded shopping mall. She ran after it, blinking as she burst back into the corridor. Though the lights had been fairly dim to her human eyes, coming from the darkness of the storefront threw her for a loop. Her claws clicked on the tiling as she ran, her head low as she followed the dry, reptilian scent of the alien. By the time she made it back out of the corridor, there were already shrieks coming from the rest of the mall. In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought as she shoved her way through the panicking crowd. She didn't need to worry about the incongruity of a wolf in a shopping mall if there was already an alien ripping the populace apart. She just had to hope that the rest of the team would turn up soon.

Tosh winced as someone hit the fire alarm; the combination of the shrieks and the shrill alarm were too much for her sensitive lupine hearing, and she whined as she swung her head about, trying to follow the chaos created by the alien. Her wolf instincts were overwhelming, and she wasn't sure what to do. If she let them subsume her, would she be able to change back, or would she be trapped as a wolf forever, forgetting her human self entirely? Would Jack have to shoot her with one of the silver bullets Owen had mentioned?

She hesitated, and that was when the creature pounced, apparently fixing on her as something that might offer it a challenge. Tosh barely darted out of the way in time, skipping to one side. Her hackles rose, and she curled her lip over her fangs as she snarled at the alien, offering it a challenge. It was bigger than she was, but that just meant that she was nimbler. As it lunged for her again, Tosh snapped at one of its legs, feeling the bone crack between her powerful jaws. She felt elated by her brief success, though the elation only lasted for a moment before she felt the searing pain of its claws biting into her ribs. Still, she'd managed to score a hit on it, and it was down to only five limbs now.

The two of them seemed to be evenly matched, and as they circled around the food court, Tosh tried to figure out the best way to gain the upper hand. Battle tactics had never been one of her strong suits; while she was excellent at chess, fights in the real world simply didn't work the same way, particularly not when it came to one on one fighting. She didn't know much about being a wolf yet, and she had no idea what her limits were. Even worse, she didn't know how to fight as a wolf. She'd scored one lucky hit so far, but she wasn't sure how she would go about bringing her opponent down. The only thing she did know was that werewolves were, according to Owen, nigh invulnerable, and she doubted that would count for much if the alien managed to rip her head off (which, judging by the carnage she'd seen thus far, it was quite capable of).

She heard the sound of gunshots ringing in the distance and wondered if Jack had come back to life, or if the police had arrived, or if it was the rest of Torchwood. Whatever the case, the damned fire alarms had stopped, and she could almost concentrate again. Tosh slunk under the tables as the alien leapt over them, knocking them over to create an obstacle course for her. One of them caught her a glancing blow, clipping the side of her head, and she yelped loudly. Another chair struck her in the side, hitting her already injured ribs, and Tosh realised she'd underestimated the alien. It didn't need to attack her directly if it just used their surroundings against her. 

While finding someplace to hide suddenly seemed like a much more appealing option, Tosh knew that as long as she kept it engaged, it wouldn't keep attacking innocent bystanders, so she picked herself up again, ignoring the blood dripping on the floor. She circled it, her sides heaving with every breath she took, and suddenly-

-without warning, the wolf instincts took over, and she sprang at it in one fluid movement, ignoring the pain as she landed on its back. She latched doggedly onto its neck, her jaws working away as she tried to sever the spinal cord. It stumbled and fell, and there was another gunshot, closer this time, spraying brains and skull fragments onto her fur. She fell with the alien, still clinging desperately to its back. It was her prey, her kill, and-

"Tosh," Owen said, crouching down next to her, and she growled at him instinctively, her hackles rising. He rolled his eyes at her. "Don't even start that with me, Tosh." There was something gentle in his tone beneath the mock exasperation, and she remembered the rabbit he'd offered her, the way he'd coaxed her out from under the bush, his surprising patience with her when she'd been alone and scared. 

Slowly, she came back to herself, and she blinked at him, thoroughly confused for a moment. She whined at him, putting her ears back, and licked his hand in a sort of apology.

"Gwen's off checking on Jack," he said, "and I sent Ianto to get you a change of clothes, since he's worked it all out by now anyway. God knows why, but Gwen's still clueless about the whole thing. Suppose we ought to tell her eventually, but we've got enough of a mess on our hands right now. Do you know how many bloody people we're going to have to retcon?" Owen shook his head. "Should've been a straightforward retrieval. Still, you did all right for your first time outside a full moon, I reckon."

She didn't think she had – she'd let the wolf take over, after all. While there wasn't anything wrong with snarling at Owen, what if she'd done the same to someone else – or, worse yet, what if she'd bitten them? Tosh recoiled at the thought. She didn't want to be a dangerous wild animal. The unbridled savagery wasn't who she was; she was cool, rational, civilised. She wanted to be human – and if she had been human just then, she might have given in to the urge to cry. As it was, she settled for curling in on herself and whimpering.

"Hey, it's okay." Owen used the same tone he might when talking to a scared wild animal – which, Tosh realised, wasn't entirely inaccurate. He reached out and scratched behind her ears. "I'm surprised you even thought to change. I don't know if I would have early on."

Ianto interrupted them with a polite cough, and Tosh struggled to her feet. Her wounds were still bleeding sluggishly, but she knew that wouldn't matter once she was human again. (She really needed to figure out how changing shape healed injuries – she suspected it was something related to the same healing factor that allowed bones to break and reform during the shift itself. Someday, she would persuade Owen to help her run tests and experiment.) 

"There are toilets just past the food court," Ianto told her, acting like it was perfectly natural to be talking to a wolf covered in alien viscera (and, in their line of work, it wasn't all that unusual). "I've checked them out, and they're already empty – or we can find a changing room, if you'd rather. Hopefully you'll find the clothes I've selected to your liking; I would have brought your change of clothes from the Hub if I'd known you needed them."

"Better you being dressed by Ianto than me," Owen remarked, grinning at her. "I don't need to look like I'm going to a funeral."

"Yes, heaven forbid you actually look well put-together and professional, Owen, rather than your usual style of a university student throwing together a wardrobe from a charity shop." Ianto sniffed derisively, leading Tosh off towards the toilets. Once there, he set her clothes down inside the handicapped stall and hesitated for a moment.

"You are all right, aren't you?" he asked quietly. "Well. Apart from being, you know, a wolf. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. I'm not judging you. It's just strange to think of you as a werewolf, that's all. I've never seen Owen as a wolf, obviously, and-" Ianto stopped suddenly. "Sorry, I'm rambling, and you're bleeding all over the place. I'll just let you get on with it, then." He gave her an apologetic smile and withdrew, leaving Tosh alone in the toilets.

When Tosh returned, Gwen and Jack had rejoined Ianto and Owen in the food court, and Jack was frowning at the bloodstains on his coat. "Do you know how hard it is to get stains out of wool?" he asked Tosh. "Especially when you don't even know what sort of blood it is."

"I'm sure Owen will run an analysis once we're back at the Hub," Tosh reassured him, "and Ianto will be able to figure out something to clean your coat with. He always does, after all."

"What did you ever do without me, sir?" Ianto quipped. "And don't say you just bought new coats, because trust me, I know how hard it is to find properly sourced military greatcoats from the Second World War."

"Well-" Jack shrugged helplessly, spreading his hands.

"Sure, Owen can analyse the alien blood," Owen interrupted, griping as he knelt next to the corpse. "Right after Owen retcons half of bloody Cardiff and spends an afternoon elbow-deep in alien guts."

"You know, I've always heard that speaking in third person is a sign of a deranged mind," Gwen offered, giving Tosh a conspiratorial smile. "Suppose I've got proof of it now."

"All right, kids, if we're all done bickering?" Jack glanced between them. "I'd like to try and figure out just what went wrong here. Someone had a Branthian impulse generator active here, implying they knew what it did and were using it for profit. That's normal enough, humans stumble across Rift debris all the time and manage to figure out how it works somehow. The alien guarding it? Not quite so typical, and it turned an easy retrieval into a bloodbath. I could be wrong, but that screams 'trap' to me. Someone knew we'd pick up the alien tech and planted the alien there to wait for us – but why?"

"It might not have been for us specifically," Tosh suggested, frowning. Her bag was still back in the empty storefront, and it had her PDA in it – not to mention all the other tools she carried with her. She would have to backtrack to get it, because she didn't want to leave any of her equipment behind. Hopefully none of it had been broken in her fall. "They could have had the creature guarding their investment."

"Yeah, well, if I were a normal human wanting to protect illicit alien tech, I'd hire some thugs to look after it. Something more from our neck of the woods – a few big guys from Newport, not a hexapodal reptilian alien hiding in the ceiling." He shrugged, toeing the creature with his boot. "Anyway, we'd better get this fellow back to the Hub so the clean-up can start. You lot know what to do – Gwen, start talking to the witnesses, Tosh, make sure all the security camera footage gets edited. Owen and Ianto, you're on corpse duty, human and alien. Same drill as always." 

"I'm sorry I couldn't do anything to save you, Jack," Tosh told him quietly, once the others had left. She'd hung back for a moment to speak with him; she still felt uneasy about the whole thing, and if there was anyone who could reassure her, it was Jack.

"Don't worry about it. Another day, another death – you know how it is." He sounded flippant, but Tosh suspected he wasn't brushing it off quite as easily as he pretended to. "It's not like we knew there was going to be something waiting for us in the ceiling."

"We should have," she muttered darkly. Tosh blamed herself for the whole mess; she hadn't been scanning for life forms, just for the signals emitted by the alien device. It was a rudimentary mistake that she shouldn't have made. 

"That was quick thinking, changing like that," he continued, reaching out and squeezing her shoulder. "It was too dark in there to try to shoot it, and you wouldn't have been able to with a broken arm, anyway. You did a good job, Tosh, and you made the best of a bad situation."

"You weren't afraid I'd lose control?" There was, after all, the possibility that she could have turned on Jack instead – something Tosh found too horrible to even contemplate. She wondered if Owen shared that fear, that he would someday attack those he cared about.

"Wolf or not, you're still you on the inside. At least, that's how Owen's always claimed it works, and I've never had any reason to think otherwise. I trust you – and if there's one thing I know about you, it's that you're a hell of a lot stronger than most people give you credit for. If you survived all that time in a UNIT cell, then you can survive this. Now, you'd better get to work with that security footage. You're going to have plenty to do once you're finished with that." Jack's words were sincere, and they took her by surprise; she hadn't known he thought that highly of her. Sometimes, she worried that he overlooked her, just like everyone else did – but then Jack always did something to remind her that he didn't miss much. Giving him a grateful smile, Tosh straightened her newly acquired clothes and headed off to do her job. She still felt a little uneasy, but surely that would pass with time, she told herself.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another shorter chapter, sorry! I'm going to a biweekly update schedule, since this is the last chapter I have completed from November, and I'm not sure I'll be able to write and edit a chapter every week. Anyway, enjoy the fic, and thank you for reading!

Owen found himself staying late to finish the dissection of the alien they'd killed in the mall a few days ago. He wasn't happy about working late, but, he had to admit, he didn't have much else to do. Ever since Diane had left, he'd stopped going out on the pull regularly, which had more or less ruined his social life. Apart from work, the only thing he ever really did was sit in his flat and contemplate his life – which had the unintended benefit of making work a hell of a lot more appealing. No wonder Tosh spent so much time at work if her only other alternative was moping around her flat all the time. Of course, she probably read or played chess against herself or something equally pathetic, too; Owen was sorely lacking in hobbies, apart from playing video games, and had no desire to acquire any.

They were the only two left in the Hub; even Jack had left for once, making a tired old crack about all work and no play that Owen was pretty sure he'd heard from him at least a dozen times, and he suspected that meant he was spending the night with Ianto. God, how pathetic was that? Even the fucking teaboy had someone, but Owen was stuck here at work, his only hot date an alien that smelt of dead fish. If Diane were here, she'd probably be disgusted by how far he'd fallen, and Katie- well, Katie wouldn't even recognise who he'd become over the years. He'd been happy with her, for quite possibly the first time in his life, and then he'd had everything ripped away in an instant. He'd nearly killed himself drinking the pain away – he certainly hadn't wanted to live anymore, even if he hadn't been actively suicidal. Of course, it would have taken a fair bit to off himself, but he'd reckoned he could've found a way. Stepping in front of a train would've left him just as dead as any other human, accelerated healing or no.

But death would have been giving up, and Owen had spent too much time fighting too damn hard for that. Even in the depths of his despair and self-loathing, even while he was feeling worthless, he hadn't been willing to lose what little he had left. Maybe he hadn't been able to make a difference for Katie, but there were still more people out there he could save, people who deserved to be saved more than he did. 

Tosh, no matter how he felt about her, was one of those people. Any of the team would have been, even Ianto, as much as he hated to admit it. What they did here was important – it had given his life some sort of meaning again after Katie had died. It wasn't the same as literally breathing the life back into someone or keeping them from bleeding out – not that that didn't happen occasionally, even here – but it was still rewarding nonetheless. He kept people safe; he'd helped save the entire bloody world more than once, and the city of Cardiff a number of times. But he was still a doctor at heart, and so what he liked doing the most was making a difference for one person who wouldn't have lived without his help. It gave him a sense of fulfilment that nothing else did; maybe nobody loved him, maybe he didn't deserve to be loved, but he could at least keep someone else alive, one more tiny spark of light in the infinite darkness that was the rest of the universe.

"Care for a coffee?" Tosh asked, leaning over the railing to watch him. She'd been lost in her own little world of coding, as she was so frequently, and so she hadn't stopped for dinner. Owen knew that when she got absorbed in her work, she could keep at it for hours on end without so much as a single break. But that was Tosh for you, more comfortable surrounded by computers and numbers than by living, breathing people. At least, he thought wryly, she would have to get out in the fresh air and away from her computer during the full moon.

"Speaking to me again now, are you?" Owen straightened up, wincing at the protest from his back. He pulled off his gore-covered rubber gloves and chucked them into the bin with an unpleasant splatting noise.

"I wasn't-" she started to protest.

"Yeah, you were, and I deserved it." As he usually did, though admitting it was a first for him. Owen made his way through the Hub's upper level and flopped down on the couch; he didn't much care about the coffee, but he did need to take a break. 

As Tosh sat down next to Owen, she passed him a mug of coffee – black, he noted, just the way he liked it. Of course she knew how he took his coffee. "I shouldn't have walked out on you, either," she said before she blew on her drink to cool it.

"You always put up with my shit, Tosh. Bloody well took you long enough to grow a spine." In a strange sort of way, he actually admired what she had done. If there was one thing he found frustrating about Tosh, it was her tendency to just take everything that came to her without any sort of reaction. She was like the machines she worked with, always logical and cold and emotionless. Getting angry with him and walking out was one of the most human things he'd seen her do in the entire time he'd known her – and, consequently, it was one of the few times he'd felt guilty about the way he'd treated her. 

"It was rude," she insisted quietly. "Maybe you don't have any problem with being impolite, but I do, and I should have behaved better."

Owen had the distinct feeling that she was both apologising and insulting him simultaneously. He frowned a little and decided to ignore it. "Apology accepted." He gave her his best shit-eating grin. "Especially if you keep bringing me coffee like this. For some reason, Ianto's decided that I can't have any while he's in the Hub." He knew why, of course, and he felt a little gratified when Tosh glanced aside, an embarrassed expression on her face.

"I'll talk to him about it," she sighed. "I didn't tell him to do it or anything, I promise."

"No, you just cut off my internet instead. I had important things to do, Tosh," he protested.

"Were those important things chatting up girls or bidding on bootleg DVDs on eBay?" she asked dryly. "Or downloading more porn – which, might I remind you, I've told you not to do a number of times."

Owen did his best to look innocent, but he couldn't exactly hide his guilt from her; he'd been the recipient of more than a few bollockings from her over the years when she'd had to remove some particularly troublesome viruses from his work laptop. The Torchwood mainframe protected the computers in the Hub, but his home connection offered no such safety. "Maybe I had important games to play," he retorted instead. You don't know."

"Oh, right, video games." Tosh rolled her eyes. "Well, I'm terribly sorry that I forced you to be a productive adult instead."

"Doesn't matter, anyway." Owen waved it off. "I've had plenty of real work to do since you and Jack found our friend over there." Though he hadn't figured out the best way to remove its blood from Jack's coat yet, he'd been analysing and testing it for the better part of two days now, and now he'd started in on the autopsy. Owen was more than capable of doing real work in a timely manner, he just objected to filling out bloody paperwork and writing reports and other nonsense that had nothing to do with his actual job, much to Ianto's dismay. Even when Owen did paperwork, it was late, incomplete, and often wrinkled and smudged with unidentifiable stains. 

"Don't remind me. I've had a field day trying to control the media on this one. You know, it must have been so much easier back before the advent of the internet – now I've not only got to plant stories in papers, but I've got to hack Facebook and Twitter and a dozen other websites. Good thing I've already got the proper monitoring software in place, otherwise I'd never get to go home." Tosh grimaced, shaking her head, and Owen hoped she wasn't about to start rambling on about technology, as she so often did.

"You never go home anyway," he pointed out instead. "You're nearly as bad as Jack like that. Or Ianto." And yet, Owen was there, and Jack and Ianto weren't. For all he knew, they were out on a date – did Jack do dates, he wondered? He didn't seem any more inclined to that sort of thing than Owen himself; he certainly couldn't imagine Jack wooing their trusty archivist. (Nor did he especially want to. Who knew what romancing Ianto might involve? Coffee and old manuscripts, he suspected, and very few things sounded duller.)

"I like work," she protested weakly. "At least I've got something to do here, something that's appreciated."

Owen hesitated for a moment. "Have you got any friends outside of work, Tosh?"

"Do you?"

Trust Tosh to turn the conversation right back on him. True, Owen didn't have anyone in Cardiff he particularly considered a friend, but he didn't need friends, either. He'd fallen out of touch with his mates from university after Katie's death, and work had kept him too busy to make any acquaintances here. If he'd been working somewhere normal, he might have befriended a few of his fellow doctors, but his options for friendship were rather limited in Torchwood, and he didn't really spend time with any of the others.

"Doesn't matter." He brushed her question aside. He really did wonder about Tosh sometimes; she seemed to shut herself away from other people to an unhealthy degree. While they were all hermits here, she took the whole thing to extremes. 

"Well, I hardly think you have any room to criticise me if you're guilty of the exact same thing. That's a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black." She hesitated for a moment. "Besides, I don't need any friends outside of work. You know how it is – I'd have to lie to them about everything anyway."

"Come on, you don't have to talk to your friends about work. You could...I dunno, do whatever it is you do for fun. Solve all the problems in a maths textbook or something." Tosh gave him a dirty look, and he amended his statement. "Watch science fiction films? Shit, Tosh, I don't know what you do in your spare time."

"Read, mostly. Work on personal projects. I tried joining a chess club once, but I kept on having to work during the meetings." She shrugged. "It's not a big deal, Owen. I'm fine on my own." He could tell she was lying from the way she didn't quite meet his eyes. "I'm used to it," she added. "It's really quite peaceful, actually."

"Sure, if you like boring things. Which...you apparently do," he amended, quickly backpedalling. "Personally, I think all the silence would drive me mad." 

"Who says I'm not?" Tosh quipped. "I work here, after all."

"Tosh, you're the sanest one out of all of us," Owen snorted. "A bit of an antisocial freak, apparently, and obsessed with repressing your emotions, but- okay, fine, I guess sanity might be relative when it comes to Torchwood." 

"I don't repress my emotions!" she insisted, a little hurt. "Just because I don't let everything hang out like you do doesn't mean I'm some sort of emotionless robot, Owen. I just prefer to keep everything to myself." Tosh glanced down into her coffee mug, studying its murky depths. "It's hardly as if anybody would care, anyway."

"I-"

"You wouldn't, and you don't, and there's no need to lie to spare my feelings, Owen." Her tone was uncharacteristically bitter. "Not that you care much about how anybody feels, so it's nice to know that I'm certainly not an exception to the rule. I have that to reassure me, I suppose."

Owen had always assumed that Tosh's feelings for him had been something along the lines of an unusually persistent schoolgirl crush, but lately, he was starting to think that they might run deeper than that. It was a worrying thought, and he wished she could love someone – anyone – else. Hell, he didn't even know why she would have fallen in love with him in the first place; it wasn't as if he'd done anything to endear himself to her. Quite the opposite, actually, and he'd done that on purpose, because it was the same thing he did to everyone foolish enough to try to get close to him. He hadn't wanted anyone else after Katie died, hadn't wanted to go through the pain of losing someone again. Falling in love with Diane had occurred entirely by accident; he'd thought they were just having sex, and before he knew it, he'd found himself in love with her. He'd been devastated when she'd left. He hadn't opened the Rift to try and save Tosh and Jack – no, he'd done it entirely in the hope that Diane would come back to him.

And now- now everything he'd done before seemed hollow and empty compared to life with Diane – compared to loving Diane. Sleeping around just wasn't the same, as he'd told Tosh, and- oh, Christ, he'd been an idiot there, telling her that girls he could share his life with didn't exist. Not that he thought that she was one of them, but he knew now how she must have seen it, what he must have done to her. Maybe he didn't care about Tosh in that way, but he was starting to feel remorse for the way he'd treated her in the past (and the way he kept inadvertently treating her, always managing to say precisely the wrong thing to her).

"Look, Tosh," he said wearily, and then stopped. He couldn't tell her that he cared about how she felt, not after what she'd just said; it would sound insincere, and she'd never believe him. "I know I'm a prick, I just- I don't know, I worry about the way you bottle everything up. And-" Shit, this was awkward. "All right, I shouldn't have called you an antisocial freak. Of course you've got friends. There's Ianto, apparently, and Jack, and Gwen, and – we're friends, aren't we?" 

"Do you even know when my birthday is, Owen?" she asked quietly.

He vaguely remembered Gwen shoving a card in his face at some point last fall, while Jack was still gone, but he couldn't remember when, and he shrugged helplessly.

"You don't know anything about me – when my birthday is, what I like to do, or anything else about my life outside of the eight hours a day we spend together at work. I wouldn't exactly call that friendship."

Owen regretted accusing her of repressing her emotions; it seemed that she was certainly opening the floodgates and unleashing all of her pent-up bitterness on him tonight. He had to admit, she had a point, and most of her bitterness and anger toward him was well-deserved.

"Your birthday is Valentine's Day," she continued, "you like to watch television and films and play video games – first-person shooters, mostly. And drink, though I'm not certain it counts as a hobby. And- well, I'm not going to mention your less salubrious pastimes. You grew up in the West End. You're entirely too vain about your appearance, and you have a wide collection of skin care products at home. You used to wear a diamond stud in your right ear because you thought it made you look cool, but Suzie called it daft, and you took it out not long after she died. You kissed me once on New Year's Eve when you were drunk and we were on the Plass at midnight, and then you forgot all about it the next day."

"Yeah, all right, you know all the stupid little shit-"

"-all the stupid little shit you don't know about me," she interrupted.

"- but you still don't know the first thing about me, Tosh. Congratulations, all you know is a bunch of surface crap, all the completely meaningless shit that fills my daily life. Would you like some sort of award? A fucking gold star for all the useless minutiae that you've managed to memorise because you thought you might be able to use it to get closer to me someday?"

"At least I've tried, Owen," she retorted sharply. "That's more than you can say –you're the one claiming to be my friend, might I point out, and these are the sorts of things that friends know about each other, because they actually talk about things other than work."

"How would you know what friends do?"

Owen asked, but he relented when he saw Tosh draw back, clearly hurt by what he'd said. He was taking it too far; he hadn't meant to get caught up in another stupid argument with Tosh, but it was the sort of thing that always seemed to happen when they spoke. He didn't want it to happen, he realised suddenly, because he was bloody tired of pushing people away. He wasn't sure he wanted to get closer to anyone, but Tosh- well, they shared a secret now, and there was no sense in making her hate him. "Sorry," he apologised, possibly for the first time ever. "I- I didn't mean it."

"Yes, you did." The brief flash of anger was gone again, and she withdrew back into herself, like she always did. Owen could see her starting to close up again, and he didn't much blame her. He knew that every time she had left herself vulnerable in the past, he'd repaid it by, well, being himself. Tosh rose from the sofa, the lines of her body suddenly tense. "I'm going home, Owen. I've spent enough time here tonight."

Owen watched her gather up her belongings and leave silently, mentally kicking himself for not trying harder to make things right. Everything he said and did with her always seemed to go wrong, and he wasn't sure how to stop it. Sighing, he abandoned his cup of coffee and went back to his autopsy. At least the alien corpse might prove to be slightly less mystifying than Tosh.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy the new chapter! I finished my plot outline yesterday, and it looks like there'll be another four chapters after this one, give or take. (I also have another 10,000 words of backstory that I might post after everything's said and done; some of it comes up in this chapter.) Thanks for reading!

When Tosh returned to work the next morning, Owen wasn't there. The autopsy bay had been tidied, and she assumed he'd stayed most of the night finishing his work, then gone home to catch a few hours of sleep. She certainly didn't mind the relative peace in the Hub for once. As she settled down at her workstation, she noticed a small microchip in a baggie placed on her keyboard, a Post-It note with her name scrawled on it stuck to the bag. 

_Tosh,_ read the accompanying email waiting for her in her inbox, _I found this nestled at the base of our friend's skull - might be a tracking chip of some sort? Knock yourself out, and tell Jack I'll be in later this afternoon._

But it was the postscript that really made her raise an eyebrow at the message: _PS- We're having a drink after work tonight, assuming we get off at a decent hour._

Owen had never shown much of an inclination to spend time with her outside of work before; when he'd kissed her, they'd been out with Suzie and Jack earlier that night, on a rare occasion of what Jack liked to call team bonding. Apart from their failed dinner a few nights ago, she wasn't sure they'd ever done anything together without the rest of the team. But, then again, it wasn't as if she spent time with anyone else, either; she and Ianto went out for coffee on occasion, but that was about it. Tosh lingered over the email for a moment, wondering what it could possibly mean - definitely not a date, she told herself firmly - before she deleted it with a decisive click of her mouse. Better to focus on the task at hand, she thought, than to spend the rest of the day consumed by curiosity.

Luck was with her; she was able to lose herself in picking apart the mystery of the chip without any interruptions from alien incursions or other mishaps. It wasn't a tracking chip - or at least, that wasn't the primary function, though Tosh had no doubt that it was possible to track the wearer through it. Rather, she suspected, it was some sort of control chip, overriding the actions of the wearer via some sort of electrical impulse. While she thought she might be able to reverse-engineer it and use the signals to track whoever had planted it on the alien in the first place, the encryption was definitely alien, and it would take her some time to work it out; she just hoped the programming itself would be easier to override. The problem with more complex alien technology was that different cultures had different programming languages, and most of them didn't bear much of a resemblance to the ones developed on Earth. (Tosh's theory about this was that while Java, C++, and others bore a distinct resemblance to English syntax, alien languages were related to alien syntax, making it even more difficult to decipher how they worked. It was a fascinating application of linguistics and technology that she wished she could share with someone, but she knew that if she tried to tell anyone else about it, their eyes would start to glaze over before long. It was what happened whenever she attempted to share anything scientific that she found especially interesting or elegant with the others, and it broke her heart a little.)

Decrypting the protection on the chip could be brute-forced in much the same way as any other sort of encryption found on Earth, and most easily done by working out the algorithm she needed to test the encryption until she found the key. She set her computer to analyse it with her standard decryption program; she didn't expect it to give her a complete answer, but she figured it would give her somewhere to start from.

"Enjoying yourself, Tosh?" Ianto asked as he stopped by her desk with a cup of coffee. She took it from him with a grateful smile and set it down on her desk before she rolled her head, trying to work some of the kinks out of her neck.

"It's an interesting bit of work," she agreed amiably. "Owen found this chip implanted in the alien we killed in that shopping centre the other day; he thought it was a tracking chip, but my bet is that it was really used to control the creature. It might not have wanted to kill us if left to its own devices, but this made it go mad and - well, you saw the result." Indeed, Ianto had had to deal with the bodies left at the scene. 

Ianto picked the baggie up between thumb and forefinger, holding it up to examine it more closely. "You think it could work on humans?"

"You'd have to ask Owen that. It depends on the stimulus the chip applies and the similarity of the alien's brain to a human brain. If I had to guess, I think it would be difficult to make it work on a sentient creature, though. Mind control is generally pretty tricky, according to our records." And Ianto was probably just as aware of the contents of said records as she was, if not more so.

Ianto hesitated for a moment, almost hovering; it was obvious even to Tosh that he had something he wanted to talk to her about. She was surprised by his sudden awkwardness – but, then again, they hadn't really spoken much since he'd discovered what Owen had done to her, and maybe he was feeling funny about that. She didn't think it made a difference; she certainly still felt like the same person, but she could see where it might affect other people.

"I need to talk to you about something," he said finally, keeping his voice low and a little secretive. "Do you want to get lunch in a bit?"

Two social events in one day? Clearly she was becoming more popular than she'd thought. "That sounds lovely." She smiled up at him. "I wouldn't mind getting out of here. Want to go to that café down the street, the one that does those nice sandwiches?"

"Whatever you like, Tosh. I'm not fussy."

Tosh didn't really care where they went for lunch, either, but she knew that with two self-effacing people such as themselves, they could end up demurring politely for hours and never actually choose anywhere to eat. "Great. I'll probably be ready in an hour or so, then." 

Ianto nodded his agreement. "I'll be waiting for you up in the tourism office."

 

"Going out?" Jack asked as Tosh gathered up her coat to leave.

She nodded, pulling it on. "Want me to bring something back for you?" She didn't mention that she was going out with Ianto; she suspected that whatever Ianto wanted to talk about, he wanted to keep it secret from Jack.

"Nah, I'm just going to have some of that leftover pizza in the fridge." Jack leaned back in his chair and kicked his shoes up on the desk.

"I think Owen ate that last night, actually." Tosh saved her work one last time and made sure everything was in order before she left, just in case anything happened while she was gone. While the Hub had plenty of backup generators in case the power went out, that didn't mean that other things couldn't happen – like Owen knocking the power cord out, or her computer getting hit by a stray basketball, or...well, a lot of things had happened to her data over the years, and she'd learnt to save as often as possible.

"Typical," Jack scoffed. "Well, I'll find something."

Tosh waved to him over her shoulder, then went to go meet Ianto. "Ready?" she asked him as she stepped through the beaded curtain dividing the entrance to the Hub from the rest of the tourism office.

"Certainly." He looked worried, and that made Tosh wonder a little; Ianto hid his emotions even more than she did. She hesitated briefly before she spoke again.

"There isn't- there isn't something going on with you and Jack, is there? Because I'm really rubbish at relationship advice, Ianto." Did he even have anyone else to ask about such things? She couldn't picture Ianto doing something like that; no matter what was happening in his private life, he preferred to keep it private.

"It's about Jack, but...no. There aren't any problems with us. Not as such, anyway- well, you'll see." He held the door open for her, and they walked out into the grey Cardiff morning together.

"That doesn't sound ominous at all," Tosh remarked dryly.

"It's not! I promise it's not." He paused. "Probably."

Somehow, his words failed to instill any sort of confidence in Tosh, but she kept her silence as they strolled across the Plass. Ianto was someone she felt comfortable being quiet around; he didn't try to fill the silence with awkward conversation the way Gwen did or poke fun at her like Owen. He simply let her follow her own inclination, knowing she would speak when she felt like it.

Once they arrived at the café and ordered their food, Ianto led Tosh to a table in the corner, setting his drink and sandwich down. "They do make good coffee here," he commented. "Much better than you'll find at Starbucks."

"Better than that coffee I brought you the first time, you mean," Tosh teased him. 

"Yes, well. You meant well, anyway." He gave her a small smile. "No one else was trying to be kind to me then." That had been the beginning of their friendship, such as it was; they'd both found themselves alienated by the rest of the team at one point, and so they'd banded together. The others hadn't been speaking to them – Ianto because he'd kept Lisa in the basement and nearly got everyone else killed, Tosh because she'd read their minds with the pendant and helped Mary get into the Hub – and it had been lonelier than usual, being deliberately ostracised.

"Listen, Tosh," he continued, "all the stories about- well, you know. What you are now. They all say that they live longer than the rest of us. Some even say they're nearly immortal." He was obviously being circumspect in his conversation, not wanting to refer to werewolves directly in case anyone else in the restaurant overheard them.

"I- I don't know for sure or anything, but, yes, I think you're right." She knew they weren't actually immortal, but they were exceptionally difficult to kill, according to Owen. He hadn't told her much about being a werewolf, but he had told her that much.

Ianto glanced away, falling silent for a few moments as he busied himself with his sandwich, but he finally spoke again, his tone quiet and nervous. "I want you to bite me."

Whatever Tosh had been expecting to hear from him, it certainly wasn't that. "What?" she spluttered in shock. "I can't just- why would you ever want me to do that?" Sure, Owen had mentioned that a number of people chose to be turned into werewolves, but she hadn't imagined anyone actually asking her to do it – and certainly not Ianto, of all people, who was as far from her mental image of a werewolf as – well, as she herself was.

"Jack," Ianto said simply, and everything fell into place in Tosh's mind.

"I can't," she replied. She understood what he wanted and why he wanted it, but she knew there was no way he'd discussed it with Jack. This was an obvious act of desperation on his part, and one she couldn't countenance.

"You don't know what it's like, Tosh," he pleaded. "I've got another sixty years if I'm lucky, and, let's face it, it's probably more like five or ten in Torchwood. Jack will live forever. I don't want him to have to face an eternity alone, not if I can give him just a little more time with me. A couple hundred more years, as opposed to a couple of decades."

It was, she thought, the same desperation that had driven him to save Lisa, partially cyber-converted; Ianto couldn't lose the ones he loved, couldn't let them lose him. Jack had come to mean more to him than anything else in the world. Tosh had never felt that way – had simply assumed that she never would feel that way about another person – and she was a little jealous. It would have been nice to have someone who felt like she was the most important thing in the world to them, to be important enough to sacrifice their humanity for. Instead, she had no one.

"This really isn't the place to be discussing this, Ianto," she said quietly. She could see the tears in his eyes, and she wondered what the other diners would think if they noticed them. Maybe they'd assume that she was breaking up with him over lunch. They certainly weren't likely to guess the truth.

"Just listen to me, please. I don't care about the down side of it, I don't care what it would do to me. I just- Jack needs me, Tosh. Maybe he doesn't want to admit it, because he's him, but...he's lost so much in his life, so many people. I don't want to be one of them. I don't want to leave him, not when there's another way." Ianto shoved his food aside and reached up to scrub his forehead with a hand.

"It's not forever," Tosh told him gently. "At least, I don't think it is."

"No, I'd need more than that to keep me alive that long. But- who knows, maybe there'll be another way to keep people alive longer a few centuries down the road, yeah?" He gave her a hopeful look. "Once our technology's advanced enough, once we make proper contact with other civilisations. It could buy me time, at least."

His argument made sense, Tosh had to give him that much. There were obvious problems with the solution – like the fact that werewolves were still very much mortal – but she couldn't think of an argument that was likely to dissuade him from his chosen course of action. He'd made his mind up, and it would take something more than her refusal to sway him.

"Ask Jack," she said finally. "If he agrees with your plan, then I'll do it." Despite Jack's insistence that she was still as human as she'd always been, she thought his opinion might be a little different if Ianto was the one trying to become a werewolf. She might not be able to talk Ianto out of it, but Jack certainly would. (She didn't want to think about what would happen if he didn't; Tosh wasn't sure she could cope with passing her curse on to someone else.)

Ianto knew what she was trying to do, of course, but he relented and dropped the topic. Tosh suspected that he would have left right then and there if it wouldn't have been rude, but if there was one thing that Ianto was, it was scrupulously polite. Instead, he poked at his sandwich, clearly uninterested in eating more.

"Owen emailed me and asked me to get a drink with him after work tonight," she mentioned idly. Just because Ianto was finished with his lunch didn't mean she was done with hers.

"Really?" Ianto raised an eyebrow. "I'll check him for alien possession when he comes in to work, then." 

Tosh rolled her eyes at Ianto, but she had to admit, he had a point. Owen hadn't shown the slightest indication in spending any time with her outside of work for the three years he'd been at Torchwood, and she wasn't sure why he had changed his mind now. "It could be mind control from a distance, you know."

"Like one of those chips you said probably wouldn't work on sentient creatures?" Ianto shrugged, sipping his coffee.

"I also said mind control is an imprecise science," Tosh pointed out. "It's easier to influence base emotions by manipulating chemical triggers in the brain. A marked change in thoughts and actions, as per Torchwood documentation, is more likely to be either an alien possession or a shapeshifter impersonating him." 

"Or else it's just someone else using his email account," he suggested.

"Or that," she agreed, "although it was sent from his workstation in the Hub, and he mentioned the microchip he left for me to analyse. So that rules out any sort of external hacking and impersonation." While it would have been simple enough for Tosh to make an email look like it had originated from another computer, nobody could have done the same with one of the computers in the Hub, thanks to the alien technology in the Torchwood mainframe. "Or maybe he just wants to apologise for being such a prick to me."

"Nope. Impersonation." He smiled at her. Tosh felt a little better now that the flash of desperation he'd shown earlier was gone; things between them seemed relaxed again, more or less.

"Brilliant. Well, if it turns out to be part of some sort of plan to kidnap me and infiltrate the security in the Hub, I'll text you to let you know you were right." At least it probably wasn't that; if aliens could influence Owen, then they didn't need to penetrate the most basic security. There were, of course, layers of security only she or Jack could get through easily – particularly the ones that protected the mainframe and the Rift manipulator – but she didn't really think that Owen was being possessed, either. For some bizarre reason, he was simply asking her out for drinks.

"I've never met a kidnapper daft enough to let you keep your mobile, you know."

"There's a first time for everything." Tosh finished her sandwich and stood up, picking her coat up from the back of the chair. "Are you going to get something to take back to Jack? He told me he was just going to scrounge up whatever's in the fridge."

Ianto wrinkled his nose. "I suppose I'd better. The only thing left in there is some sweet and sour pork that's a couple weeks old and some mouldy yoghurt that went off quite some time ago. Sometimes I think Owen brings his leftovers to work and puts them in the fridge so that I can get rid of them instead."

"I wouldn't be surprised." Tosh, of course, kept the refrigerator in her flat immaculate – though it helped that she hardly ever ate at home. Most of her meals were eaten at Torchwood, and she almost never cooked for herself outside of work; she got home late enough that takeaway was nearly always a better option. "You'd think that it would be easier to just clean out his refrigerator himself, rather than bringing his old food all the way to work."

"Maybe he wants to observe the proper procedure for disposing of biohazards." Ianto grinned at her as he headed up to the counter to order a sandwich for Jack; Tosh followed, intending to buy a coffee to take back to the Hub. When she tried to pay for her latte, Ianto waved her off. "I've got it," he told her. 

"Thanks." She gave him a grateful smile as she picked the drink up, wrapping her hands around the cup. Tosh wondered if it was his way of apologising for asking her what he had. She doubted that the issue was settled, but hopefully it was out of her hands now; Jack could take care of things from here.

 

Owen had surprised Tosh by taking her to a quiet pub to chat, rather than the clubs she knew he frequented. She'd watched him on the CCTV a few times early on, when she hadn't yet figured out why he fascinated her and she was trying to work it out – not that she'd ever admit that to him now. He'd already accused her of being creepy enough; there were some things she couldn't tell him for fear of making herself look even worse. She knew, for example, what had led him to join Torchwood – she'd been the one who had edited the recordings of his fiancée's surgery, after all. But Tosh could guess perfectly well how he'd react to that particular piece of information, and so she kept her silence; it would be better for both of them that way.

"Why'd you ask me here tonight?" she asked as she took her glass of wine from him, smiling in thanks.

Owen looked a bit sheepish as he ducked his head. "What you said last night, about how I didn't know the first thing about you. You were right."

"Sorry?" Tosh cupped her ear, pretending that she hadn't heard what he'd said. "Did I hear you correctly? Are you actually admitting that I'm right about something?"

"Oh, shut it, Tosh, we both know you're right all the bloody time," Owen scoffed. "That's part of being a know-it-all." His tone was less malicious than usual, though – almost teasing – and she suspected he didn't really mean it. At least, she hoped he didn't.

"All right, so it's more like you admitting that you were wrong. That hardly ever happens." Tosh smiled at him over the rim of her wineglass.

"True enough," Owen admitted. "If only because the rest of you lot make sure to rub it in whenever I do get something wrong. Especially Gwen; it's like she thinks I'm totally incompetent at my job." He grimaced, taking a drink of his beer. 

"Oh, I'm sure she doesn't," Tosh demurred. She didn't want to comment on anything involving Owen and Gwen; she suspected Owen was still a little bitter over her recent engagement to Rhys, even though things between the two of them had ended rather poorly. Besides, the whole thing had hurt Tosh more than she wanted to admit. "So," she continued, changing the subject, "what do you want to know about me?"

"Dunno, what do people ask at times like this?" Owen shrugged, and Tosh wondered how many friends he'd had. He might have been social once upon a time, but she wasn't sure he'd ever let anyone especially close to him, apart from his fiancée. "What was your childhood like? It wasn't shit, was it?"

"Not at all," she reassured him. "We moved to Osaka when I was two years old; my father worked for the Ministry of Defence, and they sent him there. We lived with my grandparents – his parents. They'd lived in England for awhile, but they moved back not long after the war; my grandfather worked at Bletchley Park, while his brothers all died serving Japan. Anyway, it was a typical childhood, I suppose. I liked to read a lot, especially folk tales from different cultures. My family taught me both English and Japanese from the time I first began learning to speak, and my grandfather liked to play games where he would give me codes to work out – simple things at first, but they got harder as I grew older."

"So you were a nerd from an early age? I'm not surprised." He grinned at her.

"Something like that, yes. He was the one who really got me interested in maths. My father was never around much; he spent most of his time away on business. I always looked forward to festivals because I knew that was when I'd get to see him." Tosh thought of the pictures under her bed at home, the only reminders she had of a family she was forbidden to see or talk to. "My favourite festival was the Tenjin Festival; I used to love watching the fireworks and the procession of the boats on the water. I haven't been back to Osaka since I was- oh, twenty, I suppose. Not long before I graduated from university. I went to the festival then, but my parents and grandparents were back in England – it was just me by myself." She'd stayed with her aunt that summer, but had gone to the festival one last time on her own. The magic it had held for her in her childhood had vanished; it was still beautiful, but it just wasn't the same.

"My dad was never around," Owen admitted grudgingly. Tosh was surprised by this revelation; he'd never breathed so much as a word about his family in the entire time she'd known him. "He left before I was born, actually. Didn't want a kid, so he buggered off."

"Oh, Owen, I'm-"

"Don't apologise," he interrupted. "Can't exactly miss what I've never had, can I?"

Tosh didn't think that was the case at all, but she didn't want to press it further and ruin his rare good mood. "We moved back to England when I was twelve," she offered instead; she doubted he wanted to keep talking about himself. "I wasn't very happy here – not that I had many friends back in Osaka, but I was used to Japanese culture, and...well, I didn't fit in at all in England. You know how teenage girls are, I imagine, and I simply wasn't like them. That's when everyone started calling me Tosh, because they couldn't be bothered to learn how to pronounce my name properly." Over time, Tosh and Toshiko had become two different people in her mind; Tosh was who everyone expected her to be, from the girls at school up to everyone at Torchwood. That was who she tried to be for everyone else, in order to fit in, but she never forgot Toshiko, who she was deep down inside. Jack was the only one who ever called her Toshiko anymore; she figured it was because he was far more perceptive than he let on.

"Oh." Owen winced; she knew he'd never given so much as a second thought as to what she might prefer to be called. She didn't mind it, though. Everybody called her Tosh – that was who she thought of herself as most of the time.

"That's about it, I suppose. Not much else that's noteworthy about my childhood." It wasn't terribly exciting to begin with, anyway – Tosh had lived an exceedingly normal life right up until she'd been blackmailed by a group of terrorists who'd kidnapped her mother in order to force her to steal alien blueprints for them.

"So how'd you end up hooking up with our illustrious leader, then?"

Tosh froze, giving him a wide-eyed, slightly panicked stare. She didn't know what to tell him. While the truth might have been the easiest option, she'd never told anyone before, and she didn't intend to start now. She knew that nearly everyone who came to work at Torchwood did so after some traumatic, life-changing event – Gwen being the only exception to the rule, as she was to most of Torchwood's rules.

"I didn't mean it like that." He backpedalled quickly, misinterpreting Tosh's panic. "Christ, I didn't think you'd actually shagged him- you haven't, have you? Please tell me you haven't. I always figured you had better taste than that."

"I don't want to talk about it," she said finally. "Being recruited, that is, not sleeping with Jack, which I haven't." She thought her taste was questionable anyway, given that she'd fallen in love with Owen, and she expected he agreed with her on that matter.

"All right, all right," Owen relented, holding up his hands in surrender. "Fair enough, I reckon. When is your birthday, anyway?"

"September eighteenth. Don't worry, you've got months to forget it again." Owen's birthday, she knew, was only a month away. He detested his birthday, largely because he'd had the misfortune to be born on Valentine's Day. Tosh got him a card every year, even though he did nothing but complain about the day. She knew he celebrated by getting drunk – which, to be fair, was how Owen celebrated most holidays, and nearly every other day ending in y. 

"I'll make a note of it on my calendar," Owen promised, and Tosh knew he would do no such thing. He probably wouldn't even remember it tomorrow morning. She wasn't much of one for celebrating her birthday, either, but that was because it typically reminded her that nobody could be bothered to remember it. 

She thought that she ought to ask him something, but she wasn't sure what; talking to Owen was a conversational minefield even at the best of times, and she didn't want to ruin the evening when everything appeared to be going unusually well so far. "Did you actually tell Jack you were a werewolf – is that why he hired you?" she asked finally. The pub was deserted, and the barkeep seemed to be engrossed by the football match on television, so Tosh figured it was safe to talk here.

"He didn't know it when he hired me," Owen admitted with a grimace. "I had to tell him after the first full moon- well, you remember the whole space pig debacle, yeah? He would've kicked my arse to London and back if I hadn't had a decent excuse." 

Of course Tosh remembered the space pig; she'd been terrified of going to London to work with UNIT, convinced that if she set one foot wrong, they'd stuff her back in the cell Jack had freed her from. She'd hated Owen for it at the time, even once she'd worked out his secret. He had no way of knowing about her history with the organisation, but she doubted he would have cared back then, anyway. 

"I had to ring an acquaintance of mine to get silver bullets for Jack," Owen continued, seemingly unconcerned, though Tosh blinked in surprise at that.

"What?"

"Well, like I said, sometimes werewolves snap and go feral, and shooting them is the best way to put them down. I figured that if that happened to me, Jack would be the one most likely to be on the scene, so it made sense to give him the bullets." He shrugged and drained his drink dry. "I know I warned you about that."

"Yes, but-" There was a difference between hearing about it and knowing that Owen had given Jack the bullets he would need to shoot him if it came down to it. While she understood the reasoning behind it, it made her feel a little unsettled. She shook her head, choosing to finish her glass of wine before she spoke again. "Here, I'll buy a round." She picked up Owen's glass and went up to the bar to fetch refills.

"How do you know someone who actually has silver bullets?" she asked when she returned, setting his glass down in front of him before she settled down in her chair again. "I figured they were a myth; silver doesn't have the same density as lead, you know, so it's not a terribly good material for making bullets."

"It's an alloy, I think – I don't really know, but she got awfully shirty with me when I told her I needed bullets for a World War II-era military pistol. God only knows how she got hold of the mold she needed to cast the bullets." Owen took another swig of his beer. "Ailse is the bounty hunter who saved me when a werewolf attacked me. Mad little Scottish woman. I hadn't seen her in years, and she wasn't happy about having to come down to Cardiff to deliver them, either."

"There are werewolf bounty hunters?" Tosh had the distinct feeling that she'd managed to get in well over her head this time – or, rather, that Jack had got her in over her head. "That sounds dangerous." For werewolves, anyway.

"She only hunts the ones who go feral," Owen explained, waving his hand. "That's what she told me, anyway. Dunno what she does the rest of the time, but I think there's more supernatural shit out there that we don't know about. Stuff that's kept itself hidden from Torchwood and UNIT for years."

She gave him a sceptical look. Tosh wasn't sure she believed it; all right, so the werewolves had managed to keep themselves hidden somehow, but that didn't mean that everything else was real. Besides, they had evidence of any number of myths that had been proven to be alien activity – from the Loch Ness Monster to reports of dragons. "It all comes down to Clarke's Third Law in the end," she told him. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Just because you haven't managed to work out how this whole shape-changing thing is possible doesn't mean that there isn't a legitimate scientific explanation for it."

Owen rolled his eyes at that, as he did every time she'd told him the exact same thing over the years whenever they'd been trying to figure out their latest alien conundrum. "And to quote another great author," he said, "there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

"I didn't know you were familiar with Shakespeare, Owen."

"I've read a play or two. Besides, knowing one line from sodding Hamlet isn't exactly a sign of being well-acquainted with high culture," he scoffed. 

Owen, Tosh knew well, wasn't half as ignorant as he pretended to be a lot of the time; it was unlikely that he would have scored high enough on his exams to get into med school in the first place if that had been the case, and she knew from the digging she'd done on him that he'd had top marks there.

"All right, all right," Tosh relented, laughing. "It's hardly as if I asked if you liked to attend plays or anything."

"God, no, that would be awful. I can't sit still long enough for a bloody play, so don't get any ideas in your head," he warned her. "They're way too dull for me."

"Are you suggesting that we go out on a date?" She raised a surprised eyebrow at him. Of all the things that she'd thought she'd never hear from Owen, that was probably close to the top of the list.

"You wish," he snorted, and Tosh felt her heart sink. He must have realised what he'd said, though, because he immediately added, "I'm just saying, if we did happen to do something like that together, I definitely wouldn't want to see a play. Or a museum – I bet you're the sort of person who thinks that going to a museum is a great date, aren't you?"

She was, in fact, so she saw no point in denying it, but she certainly wouldn't have been foolish enough to suggest it for a date with Owen. Of course, she also had no idea what would have been a good date with Owen; neither of them did much in the way of dating, when it came down to it. "Pool," she said suddenly. "We could, I don't know, shoot a few rounds of pool together."

"You play pool?"

Actually, Tosh was rather good at pool, since it was all about calculating angles and trajectories, but she didn't want to tell him that beforehand. "I've been known to do it on occasion," she said instead.

"Pool's a crap date," he decided, leaning back in his chair. "I'll think of something decent, you'll see. I owe you that much, I reckon."

"You don't owe me anything, Owen. If you're going to take me out on a date, it ought to be because you want to, not because you feel obligated to." This conversation – this entire night – wasn't going at all the way she'd expected it to, but now he was behaving more like his usual self.

"No, I didn't mean it like that." Owen sat up hurriedly, and Tosh wondered if he was afraid she'd walk out on him yet again. "I just- I meant I wanted to do something nice for you, that's all. Secondary to the whole...date thing, not why I wanted to- look, if you're going to get all riled up about it, we can just forget it."

Tosh sipped from her glass of wine demurely, trying to hide the blush that had risen to her cheeks. She wasn't sure what had made Owen change his mind so suddenly, but she wasn't going to object. "No, it's fine- more than fine, actually. You just took me by surprise, that's all." She would definitely have to consult with Ianto on his potential alien possession and/or mind control tomorrow, she decided, but tonight...well, tonight, she was just going to go with the flow and see where it took her.


End file.
